Critical Praxis in Student Affairs

Social Justice in Action

Susan B. Marine, Chelsea Gilbert, Susan B. Marine, Chelsea Gilbert

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642672756
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Student affairs work—like higher education—is fundamentally about change. Principally, the change work performed by student affairs practitioners is about supporting the growth and development of individual students and student groups. Increasingly, that work has called for practitioners to become more active in working to change higher education so that it lives up to its radically democratic, inclusive ideals. This means adopting new strategies to transform student affairs staff, students, and institutions, and drawing on insights from critical, liberatory theories. This text represents an effort to describe and document these practices of intentionally centering critical theories.The first section of this text examines the ways that critically-minded practitioners lead through equitable, liberatory frameworks, offering important models for reimagining the future of higher education. In the second section, the editors take up thinking and acting to support the development of critical consciousness in students, providing examples of programs, initiatives, and student support offices that center social justice in their work, and foster a critical lens through their interactions with students. In their conclusion, the editors provide a model for critical praxis, offering enduring strategies for practitioners seeking to incorporate critical, socially just praxis into their everyday work, and defining areas for future research and praxis, including identifying strategies for effective assessment of critical praxis, and modalities for "scaling up" the work for maximal impact.

PART ONE

CENTERING CRITICAL PRAXIS IN STUDENT AFFAIRS LEADERSHIP

1

CRITICAL PRAXIS IN STUDENT AFFAIRS SUPERVISION

A Trauma-Informed Approach

Chelsea Gilbert

There is a striking dearth of literature in regard to effective supervision of student affairs professional staff; the little that exists indicates that student affairs supervisors tend to tailor their supervision style to their own needs rather than the needs of their supervisees, and that, relatedly, supervisees are dissatisfied with the quality of their supervision (Renn & Hodges, 2007; Tull, 2006). Additionally, a lack of effective supervision exacerbates the risk of negative outcomes for student affairs professionals who experience negative emotional impacts as a result of their work (Lynch, 2017; Stoves, 2014). In this chapter, a framework for critical trauma-informed supervision (Gilbert, 2022) in the student affairs context will be explored, as well as concrete examples of implementing this approach within supervisory relationships.

Supervisory Conscientization: My Journey

One of my earliest memories as a full-time student affairs educator is attending a conference affinity session for new professionals. During our introductions, we each were asked to share one thing we had come to talk about, and a common theme emerged quickly. As we circled around the room, person after person opened up about the ways their supervisors had failed them and the ways that they felt misunderstood, disrespected, and disempowered. I remember marveling at how a field so purportedly committed to human development could get it so wrong with our own people.

In my first professional role after graduate school, I worked in an office dedicated to institutional equity and inclusion. I, a white, queer, cisgender woman, reported to a Black, heterosexual, cisgender woman. Similar to most (if not all) institutions of higher education, racism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, and other forms of oppression were rampant in our day-to-day work and impacted us both as we navigated the challenges of functioning in a system that denied our humanity and the humanity of the students for whom we advocated. My supervisor was not perfect, yet our interactions always made space for an open, frank discussion about our identities as we both listened to, validated, and attempted to address the harm we each uniquely experienced.

Years later, as I began to build my own team, I found myself frequently thinking of that initial supervisory relationship, considering the elements that worked as well as those that did not work and why that might have been the case. I thought about the stories shared by my colleagues in that conference affinity session and the pain and betrayal in their voices as they discussed supervisors who belittled and dismissed them. I wondered why so few student affairs supervisors, in my experience, engage with their team members as they might with their students: in partnership, mutuality, and open and honest dialogue; explicitly discussing and addressing identity and power; and, perhaps most importantly, simply acknowledging and honoring their mutual and shared humanity. These questions have informed and continue to inform both my scholarship and practice.

In this chapter, I present a brief overview of supervision in student affairs and higher education, paying particular attention to the ways that a conscious supervisory practice has the potential to mitigate the negative emotional impact of student affairs educators’ work. Building from my own experiences in student affairs as both a supervisor and supervisee, I share anecdotes that illustrate a model of critical trauma-informed supervision (Gilbert, 2022) in hopes that these might inspire other student affairs educators to harness supervision’s liberatory potential. By design, this model actively resists prescriptive instruction and is instead emergent, described by brown (2017) as an iterative process that is characterized by openness to the interconnected nature of all things. Through cultivating an emergent supervisory praxis, we give ourselves permission to be flexible and adaptable and to ultimately “intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for” (para. 19).

Supervision in Student Affairs and Higher Education

Supervision is both understudied in the higher education literature as well as frequently overlooked in the training and professional development of student affairs educators (Calhoun & Nasser, 2013). It comes as no surprise, then, that in the literature that does exist student affairs educators report being dissatisfied with their quality of supervision (Renn & Hodges, 2007) and list ineffective supervision as a primary reason for job-related burnout and attrition (Tull, 2006). Few student affairs educators view their supervisors as sources of support; in fact, in one study only one in eight consulted their supervisor during a difficult time on the job (Calhoun & Nasser, 2013). Additionally, supervisors have a tendency to replicate the supervisory methods to which they have been exposed rather than tailor their style to meet the needs of their supervisees (Tull, 2006). Thus, poor supervisory practices are cyclical, passed down through generations of student affairs educators, resulting in potentially catastrophic impacts for the field as new professionals are either socialized to replicate them or leave the profession entirely due to their negative impacts.

Higher education supervisory frameworks have only recently begun to incorporate identity consciousness into their application (Burden et al., 2019). Brown et al.’s (2019) identity-conscious supervision model and Wilson et al.’s (2019) inclusive supervision model both advocate for supervisors to consider the ways that their own identities impact their interactions with their supervisees and suggest that supervisors of student affairs educators cultivate vulnerable, authentic relationships with the members of their teams. Feminist praxis in supervision, to date only formally studied in counseling settings (Green & Dekkers, 2010; Szymanski, 2003), also presents a compelling identity-conscious framework for student affairs educators (Burden et al., 2019). These models offer exciting possibilities for student affairs educators seeking to incorporate an awareness of identity into their work with their teams of professional staff; however, none explicitly account for the ways that indirect trauma can be addressed in supervisory practice.¹

Indirect Trauma in Student Affairs and Higher Education

Indirect trauma encompasses concepts including burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious traumatization, and secondary traumatic stress and broadly refers to the toll that empathic engagement with others can take on those in helping and healing professions (Knight, 2010). Indirect trauma can cause symptoms similar to those associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as irritability, insomnia, fatigue, hypervigilance, and nightmares, and can have serious negative implications for a professional’s quality of life as well as the quality of life of those in their care (Newell & MacNeil, 2010). Student affairs educators are often “first responders” when it comes to crisis situations with students, with 97% of those surveyed in one study reporting that they had supported a student through trauma, such as situations of sexual violence, suicide, or hate crimes (Lynch & Glass, 2019). Furthermore, because “the culture of US college student affairs dictates that students are to come first . . . [a student affairs educator’s] wellbeing is only important to the extent that it allows the individual to continue their student support work” (Lynch, 2017, p. 94). This “corrosive nature of caring” (Stoves, 2014, p. 48) creates conditions that may exacerbate indirect trauma responses, leading to burnout and eventual attrition. As a result, indirect trauma is ubiquitous within higher education and student affairs settings, and its negative impacts are widespread; thus, a focus on trauma-informed supervisory models is necessary.

Trauma-informed supervision within a student affairs context has only recently begun to be addressed in higher education literature (Gilbert, 2022); however, the connection between supervision and resilience to indirect trauma is well established in the fields of counseling and clinical social work practice (see Knight, 2018). Trauma-informed supervision incorporates the broader principles of trauma-informed practice: safety, trust, choice, collaboration, and empowerment (Berger & Quiros, 2014). Effective trauma-informed supervisory practices that are correlated with greater therapist success and better professional quality of life include proactive conversations about wellness, flexibility and support, and taking a collaborative, strengths-based approach (Sommer, 2008). Despite the benefits a trauma-informed supervisory approach has offered in clinical settings, it has been limited by its lack of consideration of identity (Berger et al., 2018; Varghese et al., 2018). Supervisory practices that are responsive to supervisees’ indirect trauma must also, then, consider the ways that trauma is compounded and exacerbated by other forms of systemic oppression; after all, “trauma is intrinsically and systemically linked to experiences of racism, classism, ethnoreligious oppression, and homophobia” (Varghese et al., 2018, p. 5). Critical trauma-informed supervision (Gilbert, 2022) aims to address this gap for supervisors of student affairs educators and is grounded in the guiding frameworks of Black feminist thought and critical trauma theory.

A Model for Critical Trauma-Informed Supervision

Critical trauma-informed supervision is a framework for student affairs supervisory practice that builds on theoretical insights from Black feminist thought and critical trauma theory. Collins (2000) defines Black feminist thought as a critical social theory distinguished by “its commitment to justice, both for U.S. Black women as a collectivity and for that of other similarly oppressed groups” (p. 9). Based in intellectual traditions that long predated the term itself, it is distinguished by its understanding of oppression as a result of interlocking systems, commitment to resisting oppression through action, and centering of the contributions of Black women. Implicit in this paradigm is a critical analysis of power that questions the historical practice of positioning white men as the norm; instead, Collins (1986) asserts that centering Black women’s empowerment “is an important way of resisting the dehumanization essential to systems of domination” (p. 18). Thus, Black feminist thought offers an opportunity for individuals of all identities to use lived experience as a valuable source of meaning, to engage in dialogue as a way of knowing, and to center the ethics of caring along with personal accountability through it all (Collins, 2000).

With its focus on actions that actively resist oppression, Black feminist thought offers countless invaluable insights as they apply to practice for student affairs educators. Indeed, intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), so often considered a buzzword in higher education practice, has its roots in the Black feminist analysis of the particular ways that Black women experience the world and are rendered invisible due to social structures of exclusion (Collins, 1986). Intersectionality is defined by Crenshaw (1991) as a concept that describes Black women’s unique experiences of oppression “where systems of race, gender, and class domination converge” (p. 1246), and is thus primarily an analysis of oppression rather than simply an exploration of identity. As these insights relate to higher education, Black feminist thought calls supervisors to consider how interlocking forms of oppression might impact their team members, to disrupt power dynamics inherent in their institutional structures, and to rethink the flow of knowledge in a supervisory relationship.

Building on the tradition of Black feminist thought, critical trauma theory is grounded in the belief that trauma has been “racialized, sexualized, gendered and classed from its inception” (Stevens, 2009, p. 1). Because of these realities, concepts of identity, intersectionality, and difference are a crucial part of both making meaning of trauma as well as working with those who have experienced it (Stevens, 2016). Critical trauma theory assumes that trauma is a concept that has been socially constructed, and as such, leaves out those whose identities and experiences do not fall neatly within its borders; for example, “categories like ongoing or repeated trauma, multigenerational institutional relations, or even the sense of impending trauma . . . fall outside . . . conventionally applied PTSD models” (Stevens, 2009, pp. 2–3). A conceptualization of trauma that both expands and ruptures the traditional, psychological approach has the potential to incorporate a more nuanced understanding of social identity, power, and oppression into a construct that has been largely devoid of these analyses for much of its scholarly existence (Stevens, 2016).

Critical trauma theory becomes critical trauma praxis when practitioners in helping and healing professions begin to infuse an understanding of “the broader systemic and cultural forces that shape understandings of trauma in ourselves and in our world” (Gilbert, 2022) into their work. In this way, practitioners are able to “keep one eye on what trauma does, while keeping another on how it does it, for whom, and with what consequences” (Stevens, 2016, p. 36). In supervisory relationships in higher education, this requires first acknowledging the emotional impact of student affairs work as well as the broader societal context in which that work takes place; subsequently, it also requires recognizing the reality that this emotional impact is not distributed equitably based on social identity, as minoritized individuals in particular experience the day-to-day trauma of existing within oppressive structures (Stevens, 2009).

The elements of critical trauma-informed supervision are also informed by insights from two praxis-focused texts: Quiros and Berger’s (2013) five assumptions of trauma-informed practices viewed through a critical feminist lens, and Quaye et al.’s (2018) framework for the Strategic Imperative for Racial Justice and Decolonization embraced by the professional association College Student Educators International (ACPA). Both texts offer a call for practitioners “to cultivate a liberatory consciousness, to question institutional authority, and to rectify both historical and current harms in order to create structures that affirm the humanity of all people” (Gilbert, 2022) that is highly applicable to supervision. Next, I briefly summarize the model elements and offer insights to illustrate them from my own experience as both a supervisor and supervisee.

Element 1: Safety

An effective supervisory relationship must be characterized by a sense of relational safety (Quiros & Berger, 2013) that is rooted in love, compassion, and healing (Quaye et al., 2018). Developing a relationship of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Advance Praise for Critical Praxis in Student Affairs
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Centering Critical Praxis in Student Affairs Leadership
• Part Two: Engaging Students in Critical Praxis
• Conclusion: Social Justice in Action: A Model for Critical Praxis
• Editors and Contributors
• Index
• Also available from Stylus
• Backcover