Professor Sue Trinidad: Alright, I think we’ll get started. So the National Centre acknowledges the Noongar people as the traditional custodians, and we pay our respect to Elders past and present. I'm Sue Trinidad, the Director for the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education. And I'd like to welcome Joe Slavens here today. And I'm not quite sure how we met, Joe? I was trying…
> Joe Slavens: I found you.
Professor Sue Trinidad: You found us through the web, wasn’t it? [inaudible] He found us through the website. And so Joe will be talking about American Tales ofSocial Justice Engagement. And he is the research assistant and research team co-investigator at --
> Joe Slavens: Azusa.
Professor Sue Trinidad: -- Azusa Pacific University, or APU for short, in Los Angeles and a Doctoral student. And your wife is actually Australian…
> Joe Slavens: She is.
Professor Sue Trinidad: … so you are now situated in Australia. So Joe is very interested in letting us know about some of the work that he's been doing. Prior to moving to Australia he has undertaken current research of higher educational professional staff experiences. And he was Director of the Student Life at Simpson University in Redding, California.
> Joe Slavens: That's right, yup.
Professor Sue Trinidad: Good, got that right. And he's the lead author of the University Diversity Statement, Chair of the Diversity Initiative Subcommittee and a member of the institution's Diversity Committee. He's also been working on higher education and secondary education for 20 years,and co-authored a paper, Narrative Tales of Social Justice Engagement. So we welcome you here. We look forward to hearing what you've got to say. So it will be about a 30 to 35 minute presentation, and then there will be time for questions. So I'll hand it off to you, Joe. Thank you.
> Joe Slavens: Well, thank you all for coming. I really appreciate the opportunity to share our research in Australia. It's really exciting to be here. I've been here since early July, and to share stories and that's what I am, a qualitative researcher as maybe one or two of you are. And particularly focussing on narratives, so telling stories. And it's been exciting to get peoples' stories andto be able to tell stories, too. So thank you for having me. And I'm assuming that if you're not interested in qualitative research then maybe you're interested in social justice and that's why you're here today. So I just want to share a few… Chapter 5, the findings, which some of you are interested in, but also share the methodology of how we got there and what we did.
So as you see we've titled this American Tales, or I've titled it “of Social Justice Engagement”. I do have other names on the first screen there. And that's because I come representing a whole team of us. And there has been some transition in and out of our team. This is who is currently on it. But Dr. Alex Jun is our key investigator. And then we had another professor, Dr. Mari Luna De La Rosa was on our team. She's currently off of it. But we are spread out studying currently faculty, white faculty, who are doing social justice and doing other work throughout the U.S., too. So it's exciting for us to do this research.
So just a quick roadmap. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about ourself and our team, myself and our team. Of course [inaudible] the research. We'll have a little bit of a discussion. Possibly talk about what would be some of the possible implications of our research and then any questions. So pretty straightforward.
The purpose of our research was to explore the experiences of white administrators or professional staff at Christian institutions of higher education within the U.S. who have demonstrated a commitment to social justice. So in doing that let me just tell you a little bit more about myself. I started my doctorate in 2009. I did go part time because going full time and working full time as some of you may have done before is so -- I am currently doing that trying to figure out because I am a Boarding Supervisor at City Beach Residential College currently. So I'm trying to figure out how do I make 36 hours in a day. So if any of you have a magic potion for that, let me know.
As Sue said, we are in LA, and we are all students that are committed to social justice and racial justice and all sorts of justice. And so that's really what propels us into this research. And so in particular in looking at the purpose we looked at the reality that so often the work of social justice is assumed to be those of subordinated identity groups. And in particular we wanted to talk about the dominant identity groups. We wanted to talk about, well, what is their role. In particular it's often seen especially in higher education, well, what are the problems of students of colour? What are they going through right now? But we wanted to talk about, well, what are the impacts that dominant groups are having, whether negative or positive, on the work of social justice? And so that's why we're studying white professional staff. In particular there's also a dearth of literature on professional staff, and so we wanted to look at that.
The literature, as some of you may have done, we looked at whiteness. We looked at that often white is seen as normative, that this is the norm. Anything not white is not normal. We saw the literature talking about that and how that is unjust and how that oppresses people. And we looked at the literature about that. We looked at white identity development. You may be familiar with Helms' Model and her stage wise progression of white identity development. Then we looked at Atkinson who said, well Helms, we're not quite sure if it's quite as linear as you said. And so we looked at the literature about whiteness,but we also looked at the literature around Christian higher education, how there are often lofty missions, but maybe the actual practicality of justice and freedom isn't quite played out. They might quote the words of Isaiah bringing freedom to the oppressed,but then you see the actual reality of Christian higher education and you're like, ah, I'm not quite sure... I actually think you might be oppressing the oppressed. And so we looked at that.
And then we looked at social justice alliances. We looked at Goodman [assumed spelling] and Kendall [assumed spelling] and why do people get into social justice alliances? What's the motivation and what happens when they do it? Sometimes it's relationships. Sometimes it's merely psychology. We look at contact theory. We looked at… ah… I don't like things being unequal. Different reasons why people are doing social justice work, and we looked at the literature on that. And then we saw the research gap, and there's actually quite a big research gap. Professional staff aren't looked at very often in the literature so that would be one. Christian higher education alongside social justice isn't looked at that often. And so that's where our literature came from.
You might be with Critical White Studies, our conceptual framework. And so this is the framework that we looked at, what it means to be white, how whiteness became established legally in Australia and the U.S., in Canada and other settler nations where this is essentially the phenomena of white power and white supremacy and the group of privileges that come with membership in the dominant race. And so it is I would say a cousin to critical race theory, if you're familiar with critical race theory. And this is the conceptual framework that we've used. The research question very similar to the purpose. So what characterised the experiences?
[ Pause ]
> Joe Slavens: In looking at social justice, and I will tell you that in doing this work we realised we bit off quite a bit. There's a lot of social justice work out there. So our current research now, what we're now doing as we move forward in Australia, on the East Coast, I believe the Midwest and the South, maybe not the Midwest currently, but the South is a racial justice. So we realised it's such a broad category. But this particular setting, what's social justice, and this is our definition we took from Thompson, Hardee and Lane (2011),“to move beyond just appreciation or celebration into active efforts to examine and dismantle oppressive structures and policies and move toward a more equitable vision for the institution and its members.”
So when I talk about methodology what we did is when we asked people to nominate participants we gave them this definition and said to other higher educational professionals who are the people that have met this definition? Would you write their names down for us?Because we're interested in interviewing them. And so that's the definition we used when we did our research.
So the criteria you had to identify as white. That was the key criteria. You have to be a professional staff or administrator. You had to be working at a Christian institution. We also had to meet you and through our own lens decide if you met the criteria. And then you had to decide if you meet the criteria. You had to read the definition. You had to say, yes indeed, I'll raise my hand. Although I was nominated, I am a social justice advocate. So that was the criteria in doing it. We had six women and 11 men from across the United States in the West Coast, the Midwest and in the South. And institutions were predominantly white institutions. I would say that most of our Christian institutions in the U.S. are predominantly white. I can think of only a handful that may not be. And then varying faith orientation from Evangelical, Catholic, I'm not sure if we had mainstream Lutheran or Methodist, but we did have Evangelical and Catholic involved. And then the positionality of our researchers. Many of us are white. We had an African-American. As I said we had Mari Luna De La Rosa, a Latina professor. And my professor Dr. Alex Jun is Korean-American. Many of us had positions in the university, though I believe one of us was unemployed and currently still is at the time. So we had a variety of people on our team all looking at the stories.
Our method, as I said, is a narrative, but we use a grounded theory approach so we can look at themes, and we could find out a potential model of what might be happening with the professional staff we worked with. Interviews and transcriptions. Of course, we analysed our transcriptions. We did this -- the beauty of Google Hangouts and Skype and with researchers from across the U.S. you can do this quite easily nowadays. That was a lot of fun. Checking back with our members, is this indeed what you said? Here's the themes we're finding. Triangulation, looking at the interviews from the Midwest, the South, the West Coast. And then restoring our themes which ultimately culminated in two models, and I'll share those with you very soon.
So these were our findings, some of our findings, but the key findings. And, again, in the context of a Christian higher education situation these may not surprise you. Number one, centrality of theology and faith to social justice. So our participants often said this is why I do what I do. It's because it's part of my faith. It's part of my theology. It's a part of what I believe. If you can't read that I'll read it for you. The idea is how do we make Earthlike Heaven as much as possible?Was what one participant said. Another participant said a calling from scripture to be about this business of making the world reflect more the way that God intended it to function. The value of scripture teaches for what the Kingdom of God looks like when Jesus came to bring. So this is the type of things we often heard from participants. What's interesting is the next finding. Aspirations for and frustrations with Christian higher education.My faith helps me but my faith hurts me. So where I as a participant might say the idea is how much do I make Earthlike Heaven, I might have a fellow colleague who says, oh, you're simply about trying to feed the pagans, that's what you're about. So what they found is I work amongst colleagues who believe very differently. We look at the same text, we look at the same scripture, we have the same church, but I see things very differently than you see them. And so this faith that helps, I'm encouraged by my faith, it hurts. A particular reason it hurts is because a lot of my colleagues don't agree with the way I see my faith and my theology. At my institution I think I'm sort of viewed as an anomaly which I took pride in that for a while, but I wish it was just like, you know, I wish that people were involved. Very similar theme in these Christian institutions. I wish that others did this work with me. I wish this wasn't an anomaly. I wish that other people believed in racial justice, social justice, gender justice, whatever the case is. I feel like oftentimes I'm pegged as the squeaky wheel in things. I feel like the dissenter or the voice of difference. So even my value of caring about that, having difference represented in a place compels me to stay.
And so we found, and this is a question I would ask participants, you would see the sorrow, you would see the anguish sometimes. And sometimes it got so palpable when I was in an interview I would say twice, three, maybe four times I'd say to a participant why are you staying at this institution? You're making it so clear to me you're not welcome here. You make it so clear to me as I think a sense of belonging, the other things we know about students and why they stay in an institution and retention and attrition. And I'm thinking everything I'm hearing is you shouldn't be staying. And this is one reason they stay is because I want to stay. This compels me to stay because I believe in it.
What's interesting, and I've said this to my fellow researchers, what we're not doing is we're not interviewing those who have left, though. That's what we're not doing. So since then two of our participants have left. And I asked them why did you leave? And they said this is one reason.
> Audience member: They said because you interviewed them.
[Laughter]
> Joe Slavens:That's right because I asked them the question. That's right, the suggestion, the power of it.
And then two models. I said we used the grounded theory approach, so I'm excited to share with you the models. I was able to share I believe one of them -- no, actually both with EPHEA briefly, I'm not sure what EPHEA stands for.
Audience member: Equity practitioners.
> Joe Slavens: [Inaudible] in higher education.
Audience member: Yeah.
> Joe Slavens: Yeah. And so this is what we found in our studies. For those who work in social justice this won't be that surprising, some of these things and even some of these words. But this is what we found of their white administrators. And I want to focus particularly on two.
One, we found that our -- this will be similar to contact theory, if you’re familiar with contact theory. But our participants were often if not always moved into a cycle of critical consciousness regarding social justice because of an activator. An activator, what I mean by activator, is an actual person. Not necessarily a workshop they went to, not necessarily a book they read, but it was a relationship they have. It was a relationship with the “other”, or it was a relationship with another white person who was, and I put the other in quotes, another white person who was already within the cycle of critical consciousness, who was aware and who helped make -- I think of a situation where I was interviewing an administrator and he was wearing a wig. And I think it made him look -- I can't remember right now. I think at that time it looked like he was potentially identifying with someone from an under represented group, a marginalised group. He was driving. And a white person was sitting next to him. I believe he was pulled over by a cop. He went through, and I forget why the cop said he was pulled over. And the passenger, who was aware of what was going on said, do you realise now why you were just pulled over, don't you? No, they said my light was out or something. No, that's not why you were pulled over. You were pulled over because of the wig you have on your head. They thought you were someone else. And he said at that moment other things started to come into -- it was kind of an activating moment. We call that awakening. You start to kind of go, wait a minute, does my privilege, my white privilege, is it real, does it mean something? And you start to think about that. And this is critical white studies.
This is I start to think about what does my whiteness mean? What does that look like? And then an awareness. What was interesting as we talked to our administrators and our professional staff once you're aware, you're always aware. You cannot now NOT be aware. You might want to hide behind your privilege at times. You might wish you weren't aware of the injustice and the systems of oppression. You might wish you didn't feel the desire to dismantle systems of oppression. You might, but you're always aware. And so then there's action, there's advocacy, of course. And then there's alliances. There's actually a shedding of some relationships and a gaining of new relationships.