A New Beginning

I guess this is the time where I contextualize that all of the blogs up to this point were actually for a class assignment. I was posting on another blog site for awhile off and on, but rather it seems like this is a better forum to be able to express myself. Maybe, in some way I want people to find this. Yet, I do not want to display it as open call of myself. No one reads my old blog, and too many people read facebook notes. I guess in some bittersweet way stumbling upon this would be less intrusive, even if it is just as technically, available.

Raise your glass!

Mattering: A Tale of Understanding the University Machine

I started out this course expecting to learn about the American college student, but I ended up learning about myself. I graduated from Cal State Long Beach roughly a year ago and there never is a gestation period to reflect on the college experience. Maybe people look back fondly at graduation photos, if they could afford them. Prior to this class I had only remembered moments in classes or a book I might have actually read for a course.

Universities are focused on retention rates and making students aware the reasons to continue their higher education. This is why there are often mandatory University 100: Introduction to the university courses. There is never University 500: You've graduated! Now what? course.

It goes without saying that everyone's college experience is unique and everyone learns different life lessons while there. However, there is a commonality in the types of lessons people learn and what sort of traits an engaged citizen has. College might not be the only place to learn these lessons, but it is a place that encourages that those lessons should be learned, which is why the college student is worth research investigation.

This class in particular focused on the development of traditional college aged citizens and provided me with many theoretical lenses to improve how I can interact and teach, college students. I have learned that although my experience is unique, it does not mean that other students did not develop in a similar parallel way. I learned that because I have a unique perspective that I should share that with other students, teachers, and student affairs people to best address the needs for as many students as possible.

In many ways prior to this class, I have felt like I have been betrayed by student affairs professionals. They were the people that always had to tell me "bad things," or if I ever had to talk to them it was to take care of a "bad thing." Now I realize that people enter this field because they do have a genuine interest in helping students. I was just a particularly stupid and self-involved one. I also realized that maybe since this course is offered here and not necessarily everywhere that my disdain for this profession could be based on mattering. If the student professionals had been mindful of Schlossberg than I might not have felt so alienated by the university system. When we covered mattering and marginality I had a hard time listening to people tell me how significant they thought that was and I realized that they probably felt like their university made them feel like they mattered and I had not had the experience until recently.

So, I guess my Aha! moment, as awful as this may sound, would be gaining the respect for the student affairs professionals at universities. They are not evil pencil pushers at a desk, they are the first people to talk to the students that I will have to teach. They get to send home the acceptance letters and decide the student makeup of the university as a whole. I had always thought of it as a more computer generated process. There are people that do these things! The university is not some enigmatic SkyNet robot, I feel comfortable enough making a Terminator reference at this point in the semester, that is pulling all of the strings. There are people, that genuinely care about the students and their well being. Its more important than I had ever bothered to consider or imagine.

Theoretical Leap

Theories provide a starting point to help manage the real world. Through multiple theoretical stances people can attempt to predict the possible outcomes of any given situation before it happens. Taking a proactive stance on potential outcomes means that one could be the most prepared for decision making. College students are a unique type of creature. They are not all the same, yet there are commonalities in the process of maturation that occurs primarily amongst college aged students.

There are however, certain factors that can play into the development of a welcoming community for incoming college students. Having the knowledge of critical race theory does not mean that colleges should shy away from the inclusion of people from different socioeconomic or racial backgrounds, for fear of conflict. But knowing that different backgrounds could plat a significant role in conflicts that arise, and simultaneously resolving them. Being able to utilize certain theories a professional might be able to see what stage of moral development a student is at in order to help them achieve. Or a professional could asses what intellectual phase a student is in in order to aid a student's comprehension of a situation.

Theory in this particular instance can help faculty address a changing college climate. Many factors attribute to the college experience but there are certain social factors that educators and student affairs people should be paying attention to. The significant increase of Latino students, the declining economic conditions, the steady decrease of male athletes since the implementation of title IX all have contributed to the constantly evolving face of the college campus. Studying the climate in which students that we will influence therefore is essential to the improvement of the college experience for all involved.

Therefore it is our role to take the critical leap from the reading theory into the application of theory. In doing so we will be doing our best to maneuver students that have grown up in a different age for careers that might not exist yet. However. we push forward knowing that this path had been laid before us, and we shall do the same.

The Space Between: Negotiating Theory and Practice

Although there are a lot of books about teaching it is impossible to learn how to grapple the reigns of a classroom just from reading a book. This is because there are certain unpredictable elements to teaching or mentoring that are inherently bizarre or so mundane it is overlooked. For years I have heard from other instructors and the news media that the rate of education has declined in the United States. However, I had not noticed because I did not have to interact with students composition abilities and the students that I did work with at the high school level were advanced speech and debate students. Needless to say, I had a skewed sample of students.

However, I think that the skewed student sample is part of the chasm that exists between theory and practice. For example, this entire blog assignment asks each student to assess or relate course materials to their undergraduate experience, but people not taking this graduate level course would not be taking such a critical look at their undergraduate experience. I think I am comfortable saying that people do reflect on their experiences but not in the same way. I doubt that anyone is picking up Chickering's Vectors for light reading.

When I look back at my college experiences I have to recognize that I am a unique student because I am pursuing an even more advanced degree. I am not saying that graduate students are a different caliber of student, but I would say that students that decide to pursue a master's degree are atypical college students. I can easily reflect and say that when I started college I was not as individually motivated to excel. However, after I was academically dis-enrolled from Cal State Long Beach I gained a new perspective on life and college. For some reason, I was more invested in earning an education when I had to start paying for it. I became more invested in taking initiative and completing assignments for my own fulfillment and not merely for the graded aspect of a course. I became a more involved student not too invested in forensics but in many fields. I would say that I did end up adhering to most of the PTP steps outlined by Knefelkamp, even though I had not explicitly followed them to a T. It helped to demonstrate that difference.

In any academic field, I believe, it is important to know the base theories on which the field functions, but we must acknowledge that part of our role as educators and administrative professionals is to propel the research more in order to best address student's needs. This is why more schools are adopting online courses and make other significant changes because the skills and lessons that students are learning now are going to go to jobs that potentially do not even exist yet. The grounding of theory is the first step to be being able to meet and asses those students' needs and then in order to help our own as we continue to grow and learn through the education process.

Tangled Up In Blue

It is difficult to explain the notion of intersectionality to someone that might no view themselves as a dynamic multiplicity of meanings. Every person has multiple words that they would/ could use to identify themselves. However, people are usually not encouraged to embrace those words. We are labels, whether we wish to be or not. I am in a constant state of gender operationalization. I wish that I could manage all of the different labels that I defying and adhering to at once but, that is essentially impossible. The coming out process for gay people is not an event. There is no Outmitzfah that someone announces their place in the world and that is the one time they must do so. In fact for members of the LGBTQ community it is essential to pick and choose when they can be themselves and when there are other issues that need to be foregrounded. I feel this sort of pressure on a regular basis.

Butch, Dyke, Femme

Being a lesbian teacher during a tumultuous time period in the gay rights movement has not been easy. Moving to the Midwest has also changed my perceptions on the status of gay people in our country. For five years as an undergraduate I was a confident outspoken lesbian. Now, there are times I pray that I go unnoticed. I have never felt more pressure to conform and to fit ideal standards of femininity until recently, and my mother works in fashion! I get a lot of pressure to, "look like a woman."

I had never really sought the comfort of an LGBTQ group until I moved to a place that did not welcome gay people. There is a fundamental difference between being welcomed and being tolerated. At the very least I am tolerated, in Minnesota. However, that varies from person to person. Lately, I have felt extremely isolated and have been thinking about approaching an LGBTQ center and actually being part of queer community and family, but now I am scared. For the time in my adult life, I feel scared about my lesbianism. I feel like if I come out of the closet that students that do not like me will retaliate. I know that seems like a far fetched or paranoid, but this is the sort of behavior that is inherent to someone that is experiencing this phase in gender identity development.

Tomboy, Lesbian, Queer

I had never really felt the sting of gender identity until I committed to cutting off my hair. I went from someone that could pass as woman to a dyke, literally overnight. I would never classify myself as a "dyke." I am really feminine. I just wear men's clothes. Many people are surprised, after they know me for an extended period of time, because they would not have expected me to be that person. I know who I am. Because gender is a fluid continuum, I am constantly negotiating gender identity. This is probably why I identified the most with D'Augelli's model of gender identity, because it is contingent on interactive processes and environments. I felt more comfortable being a lesbian in Long Beach for multiple reasons. I had to transition, in many ways. I needed to adjust to the Midwest, to being a teacher, being a coach, and I had to do all of this with my partner. The difficulties that one faces as an LGBTQ student and teacher are ever piling. I would not suggest that LGBTQ people face more difficulties than others but as student affairs professionals it is important to notice the unique problems that usually affect these students.

Teatro Campesino and Ploicy Debate or My Freshman Year of College

My freshman year of college I was on the Long Beach Speech and Debate Team. I was more involved in debate at the time, but Long Beach's debate squad was not a traditional debate team, for lack of better words. Policy debate as it is understood by most people is a fast paced evidence laden debate. However, the Long Beach team was a critical debate team, meaning that when team's that had a lot of money to keep their policy debate files fresh we would read poems and play hip, or even performing drama.

The resolution that year was the largest and most vague resolution to date.

(2003-2004) Resolved: The United States federal government should enact one or more of the following:
* Withdrawal of its World Trade Organization complaint against the European Union's restrictions on genetically modified foods;
* A substantial increase in its government-to-government economic and/or conflict prevention assistance to Turkey and/or Greece;
* Full withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation;
* Removal of its barriers to and encouragement of substantial European Union and/or North Atlantic Treaty Organisation participation in peacekeeping in Iraq and reconstruction in Iraq;
* Removal of its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe;
* Harmonization of its intellectual property law with the European Union in the area of human DNA sequences;
* Rescission of all or nearly all agriculture subsidy increases in the 2002 Farm Bill.

See, I told ya! It was a monster! The difficulty of this resolution is that any team would be within reason to run a policy change on any of the planks of this resolution. My debate partner and I chose the Farm Bill plank. Through all of our research we noticed that the 500 page Farm Bill never once addresses farmworkers, you know the people that pick our food. My debate partner Alexis is Latina, and I grew up in an agricultural area of California and had to see the effects of farming serfdom. We felt that we would assault the Farm Bill for its omission of the people that literally work in pesticides and are despised by most of the United States. We decided the best way to argue the resolution was to argue that the Farm Bill purposely excluded farmworkers because it was in the best interest of agriculture to not have the discussion. We incorporated critical race theory and agricultural exceptionalism. We also did a performance of Luis Valdez collection of Teatro Campesino. Teatro Campesino roughly translates into the Farmworker's Theatre. During the first La Raza movement of the late sixties the movement wanted to mobilize the farmworkers in order to unionize. However, a significant portion of farmworkers had worked their entire lives and could not read pamphlets, so in order to get the message across they performed plays in Spanish and English that spoke to the plight of the farmworker. They were performed on the back of truck beds in fields and used as a means of resistance to the hegemonic powers of big business farming. We performed a short play in our debate rounds. My debate partner played a farm worker and I played a farm boss. I wore a "cowboy hat," and a pig nose. At the end of the short play my pig nose was taken off to reveal that I too am a worker that had bought into the system of oppression.

I was nineteen when I was reading all of this. I had felt a connection to it but I could not wrap my head around why I felt so passionate about this issue. I think very few white people read critical race theory (CRT) and understand it. I guess I always operated under the assumption that if we allow one time of oppression that it allows for the rationalization to oppress other types of people. When reading the racial identity development chapter it reminded me of my freshman year of policy debate. I always had a deep feeling of frustration towards racial inequity, I just never realized that I had the unique ability to change the status quo, until someone opened my eyes. I began college in the conformity stage because I never even thought to explore a different cultural heritage before going to college. I always said things like, "I'm white. I don't have a culture." As if that was a truly adequate response to issues of culture and race. I think after my coming out experience and being more attuned to how hegemony functions in the greater society I can say that I see myself in the synergistic articulation and awareness phase (of course I would have the hubris to assume I am at the best point, right?). I am constantly learning about different people and their experiences. I structure the classes I teach in that way and I live my life trying to learn about how other people live. I think there is a naive assumption that the way some people grow up as the norm. For example, many people like to say things like, "When we were growing up it wasn't like it is today." Despite that being an obvious statement there is the assertion that all people from a particular time grew up in the same way, which simply isn't true. At any point I think as educators it is our responsibility to help students address not only their place in the world but to help them understand others' place in the world as well.

Being a Critical Pegagogue Ain't Easy

I am a critical pedagogue and I cannot express how often I have to have discussions of privilege, race, gender, and power. People that benefit from situations of power never want to be told that they have power. I am actually very nervous about a class discussion concerning this. My social identity is constructed in the opposition of the powers that be. It is difficult to be in a state of constant crusade.

Here is how the conversation usually shakes out. There is an over arching statement about power and those that are influenced by it and those that have it never want to act like they have the responsibility to change the status quo. I never realized that I had privileges as a white woman until I moved out on my own to a large city. Long Beach California is a very diverse city, and Long Beach State University has on of the most diverse student populations in the country. When I moved for college it became very clear what areas of Long Beach were "safe," and what areas were not safe. As can be expected, areas by the university and the beach were pristine. However, by the freeways leading out of the city and more into other branched out areas of Los Angeles (Compton) the quality of the public parks and schools deteriorated with the housing conditions, not to mention parking.

My sophomore year I moved to what the kids would call a, "sketchy," neighborhood. The billboards near my house were not in English and walking around at night was not recommended. However, I realized as I lived there for an extended period of time that most of the people that lived there were families. The parents worked multiple jobs and they were just getting by as well my roomates and I were. I remember I would tell people what neighborhood I lived in and many college students that had the privilege of rent being paid for by their parents could not understand how I could live, "there." I actually look back on my time there fondly.

Privilege is something that can be explained relatively easy to people but it often offends people with privilege. To say that some people get a head start implies that the people that have the head start intended for it to be that way, but if children are born from two white parents that have graduated from college those children are also likely to go to college. That is a pretty safe non-offensive suggestion, however to insist that people that are not privileged have to work harder to get to college and to make it through college is when privileged people get offended. No one likes to be told they have had things handed to them, we all assume that we work very hard and no one could understand our trials. We are all a bit self serving in this regard, however people of color or any poor person has to work harder to gain certain privileges.

At one point in my college career I was homeless and I still kept my job, kept competing in speech, and kept going to school. I had to work harder to get my education than other people and I am not afraid to make that claim. I am not saying in way, shape, or form, that other people did not earn or deserve their education but I had to work harder for mine than someone that had everything paid for them, which is why I relish my graduate teaching position even though I do face some internal frustration at the students that waste their college experience and do not go to class.

I think that it is easy to explain oppression and to point out instances in history when oppression was wrong but it is hard to tell someone that they have an oppressive ideology when they are not aware that they have it. It is a delicate situation to say the least. I recognize that I have privilege as a white person and a college graduate however I also am a woman and a lesbian to boot. I started the coming out process when I was nineteen. It was extremely underwhelming. Everyone knew I was a lesbian before I was completely certain however I can tell you that I am treated differently now than I was then. I did not start experience oppression until I started to look like a lesbian. Being visibly against gender norms is not an easy line to walk. Many people I do not know look at me with disgust. People assume I am a lesbian by my appearance and people make comments about me being a man. I have been yelled at by strangers. I have had threatening looks and situations unveil themselves. It is scary not fitting the norm. Quite frankly people do not know what the norm is until they are forced to confront something that is different; like me.

Oppression is wondering if someone that stares might be the end of you. Oppression is moving to the Midwest and realizing that there is a difference between California and Minnesota and it isn't just the snow. Oppression is being threatened by strangers. Oppression is canceling marriage plans. Oppression is being arrested, almost, by police for being angry about my marriage being stolen, and oppression is not being able to be honest to people out of fear.

My social identity is constructed around my sexuality and my ability to articulate my experience to others. If I can get through to one person that being an LGBTQ educator is more difficult than just being an instructor. The words to describe it are not even recognized by hegemonic powers. Heteronormative isn't a word according to Microsoft Word and Blooger.com. And yes it is worth mentioning. I hopefully can change the system for someone else that wishes to take the same road less traveled. No one should have to live in fear but it happens daily. I believe that it is my responsibility as an educator to change that.