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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Tools and strategies to foster transformative change for social justice Many believe that social justice education is simply the new politically correct term for diversity-focused intervention or multiculturalism. The true definition, however, is more complex, nuanced, and important to understand. Higher education today needs clarity on both the concept of social justice and effective tools to successfully translate theory into practice. In Advancing Social Justice: Tools, Pedagogies, and Strategies to Transform Your Campus, Tracy Davis and Laura M. Harrison offer educators a clear understanding of what social justice is, along with effective practices to help higher education institutions embrace a broad social justice approach in all aspects of their work with students, both inside and outside of the classroom. Theoretical, philosophical, and practical, the book challenges readers to take a step back from where they are, do an honest and unvarnished assessment of how they currently practice social justice, rethink how they approach their work, and re-engage based on a more informed and rigorous conceptual framework. The authors begin by clarifying the definition of social justice as an approach that examines and acknowledges the impact of institutional and historical systems of power and privilege on individual identity and relationships. Exploring identity devel-opment using the critical lenses of history and context, they concentrate on ways that oppression and privilege are manifest in the lived experiences of students. They also highlight important concepts to consider in designing and implementing effective social justice interventions and provide examples of effective social justice education. Finally, the book provides teachers and practitioners with tools and strategies to infuse a social justice approach into their work with students and within their institutions.
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Seitenzahl: 374
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Series Page
List of Tables and Exhibits
Dedication
Foreword
Preface
Organization of the Book
Audience and Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Chapter 1: Uncovering Epistemology
Positivism versus Postpositivism
Participatory Research as a Model for Knowing
Conclusion
Chapter 2: A Toolkit for Understanding a Social Justice Paradigm
Defining Social Justice
Equity versus Equality
Critical Definitions
Social Construction of Identities: Positionality, Dominance, and Subordination
Conclusion
Chapter 3: From Wealthy White Landowners to Affirmative Action to Proposition 209 to Grutter v. Bollinger
Unequal Opportunity and Injustice for All but a Few
Present Effects of Past Discrimination
Policy Responses to Injustices of the Past
What Next? Ignoring the Roots of Inequality or Building Toward Equity
Educational Benefits of Diversity
Postracial America?
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Critical Pedagogy
Social Construction
Historical, Political, and Economic Influences on Knowledge Production
Hegemony and Power: Exposing How Knowledge Is Validated or Invalidated
From Masks of Ideology to Critical Consciousness
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Situating the Self
Barriers
Strategies
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Media Literacy
Critical Thinking
Tools
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Disrupting Organizational Practices to Empower People
Conventional Organizational Practices
Systems Approach to Organizations
Conclusion
Chapter 8: Strategies for Reinvigorating Social Justice in Higher Education
Critical Counterhegemonic Practices
Matching Learner Meaning-Making Capacity with Effective Learning Strategies
Social Justice Allies
Conclusion
References
Name Index
Subject Index
Cover design by Michael Cook
Cover image : © Viktoriya Sukhanova/iStockphoto
Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, Tracy
Advancing social justice: tools, pedagogies, and strategies to transform your campus
Tracy Davis, Laura M. Harrison. -- First edition.
pages cm. -- (The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-38843-3 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-41751-5 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-42208-3 (ebk.)
1. Social justice--Study and teaching (Higher) 2. Education, Higher--Social aspects. 3. Critical pedagogy. I. Harrison, Laura M. II. Title.
LC192.2D4 2013
370.11′5––dc23
The Jossey-BassHigher and Adult Education Series
List of Tables and Exhibits
Tables
Exhibits
From Tracy
I dedicate this book to Janet and DeWayne Davis, who nurtured in me a sense of justice, allowed me to fail, and taught me the fundamentals of equity and inclusion, and to Marjorie, Tyler, and Evan, who remind me to practice what I teach.
From Laura
I dedicate this book to Dan Harrison, who first taught me about justice, and Christy Zempter, who empowers me to become my most authentic self.
Foreword
The journey toward the focus on social justice in higher education has taken a winding and sometimes confusing path. During my more than thirty-five-year career, I have participated in conversations and educational activity focused on such topics as “managing diversity,” “dealing with difference,” “multiculturalism,” “pluralism,” and many other descriptors. While much of the effort to affect access, inclusion, and positive climate for diversity has been well intentioned, it has too often been poorly framed and lacking in conceptual rigor—the desired positive effects of our work have too often been undermined by the inadequacy of the frameworks to which our efforts have been attached.
The social justice movement brings with it a new promise. Social justice, when pursued according to its true meaning, provides a frame that compels educators to think and act in a more dedicated and compassionate way toward all students; professionals committed to social justice will advocate for treating all students in a humane and dignified manner. A focused approach to social justice has the potential to profoundly alter the texture of our relationships with learners and transform the landscape of the learning climate on our campuses. Even more, if we sincerely embrace what it means to be a social justice educator, our connection to the world and the dynamics of our relationships will reveal new levels of awareness, commitment, and accountability for the conditions that we create and the effects of our ways of being on all with whom we have interaction. If we take the social justice imperative seriously, we will move beyond advocacy and commit to transforming who we are in our relationships with others.
While acting in a socially just manner can be described in a simple and easy-to-comprehend way, true social justice is much more difficult to achieve. Our assessment of human nature tells us that most of us carry in our hearts a deep desire to be fair and just in our treatment of others—we want to be architects of inclusive and caring networks that advance the common good. At the same time, each of us carries within us our own political ideologies, spiritual or religious outlooks, conscious and unconscious socialization, and deeply held personal values (some of which we have not examined). We are too often not aware of the strength of our perspectives and how our beliefs about particular groups and issues influence the ways in which we communicate or affect our ability to create space for others in conversations or learning experiences.
The power of Advancing Social Justice is its direct challenge to us to take a step back from where we are, do an honest and unvarnished assessment of how we currently practice social justice, to rethink how we approach our work, and to recommit and reengage in accordance with a more informed and more rigorous conceptual framework. Tracy Davis and Laura M. Harrison remind us that social justice demands equitable distribution of resources, as well as commitment to methods that allow full participation by all: social justice is not just a matter of expressed values, but how we use our knowledge, skills, and power to construct educational practice to allow access and inclusion in the learning process. Social Justice 2.0, as coined by the authors, advances a depth of relationship between educators and learners that we have either avoided or failed to recognize.
Social Justice 2.0 has at its foundation deep respect and regard for the personhood of all students; in place of harsh judgment of the attitudes and perspectives presented by the learner, the educator will offer care and commitment to helping the student successfully navigate the path to deep and personally meaningful awareness. A new approach to social justice demands that we have affection for the learner, regardless of the degree to which the student's attitudes or perspectives align with our own, as it is only from a place of affection that we can responsibly and humanely support students in the learning process. Social justice is framed as a truly generative process, one that links mentors and learners in educational processes and calls upon us to adopt a pedagogy rooted in empathy, deep care, and commitment to those with whom we are involved in the learning process.
Social Justice 2.0 calls out the fact that while many of us have approached social justice work armed primarily with our values and personal commitment, in fact, we need more. Specifically, we need the appropriate tools to address the complex and nuanced world in which we live. We need not only knowledge and skills, but also the affective disposition to lovingly engage with the world and those with whom we are in educational relationship.
Advancing Social Justice provides essential guidance for redirection of social justice work on college and university campuses; it provides a context and framework that help us squarely and constructively address where we are at this point in our social justice efforts and approaches to redirect our work based on what the academy most needs from those of us who call ourselves educators. The book is theoretical, philosophical, and practical. It offers not only an orientation to the concept of social justice, but also guidance on how to initiate the process of adopting more socially just ways of teaching and leading.
Advancing Social Justice is a powerful call to action. This book is a thoughtful and well-articulated assessment of our approaches to social justice, with solidly grounded recommendations for moving forward. It will be of immense value in encouraging reflection among educators and challenging us to examine our beliefs and behaviors. Advancing Social Justice personally inspires me. This book not only is a guide to personal transformation but also maps the path to transforming our systems and processes. I will go even further and suggest that if we take the guidance of Davis and Harrison seriously, we have a blueprint for reclaiming the health of our campuses and restoring the spirits of so many whose lives have been negatively affected by social and institutional oppression. Advancing Social Justice makes an important and unique contribution to the conversation about the soul of higher education and the role educators play in fulfilling the grand promise of the academy.
Larry D. RoperVice provost for student affairs and professor of ethnic studiesOregon State University
Preface
This book is about theorizing and practicing social justice education differently. There are high-quality books that frame the issues surrounding social justice in higher education quite lucidly. Yet our experience with social justice education suggests that focusing on technical implementation of strategies has to give way to becoming and being socially just. The more we wrapped our heads around what we thought needed elucidation, the clearer it became that the model itself needed radical reexamination. It wasn't so much the concepts that needed reconsideration, but rather the processes or approaches that educators and those “in the know” use to promote learning and liberation.
We needed a shorthand way of talking about what we meant, which led one of us to start calling our idea “Social Justice 2.0.” Working together on our iPads inspired this heuristic and helped us understand with greater clarity the book we wanted to write. Rather than simply adding new techniques to an existing paradigm of social justice education, we agreed with Steve Jobs's challenge to “think different.” As with the iPad, we needed to create something that could shift our understanding of the nature of the work itself. We write as “friendly critics,” people deeply committed to social justice both personally and professionally. Our critique comes from a place of serious concern about the future of social justice in higher education, not an indictment of it. We watch as diversity offices lose funding, affirmative action faces erosion, and hate incidents continue to proliferate, and we wonder if a fresh approach to how we theorize and articulate social justice in higher education is what is needed. We think it is.
What does Social Justice 2.0 look like? First, it questions what has become an unfortunate orthodoxy reminiscent of the very impulses that social justice educators tend to oppose in fundamentalist political approaches like those used by shock jocks and sound bite pundits. Too often, social justice education operates from the “getting it” model, dividing the world into enlightened students who agree with ideas like affirmative action or same-sex marriage and those who don't. As a result, the learning outcome becomes an indoctrination of sorts, which creates both confusion and resistance. Social Justice 2.0 rejects this notion of a neatly delineated left and right and right and wrong, proposing humility as the only workable starting place for truly engaging students in the intellectually and personally challenging work of social justice education. Humility can be terrifying for many reasons. Humility demands a vulnerability rarely achieved in intellectual spaces where making points and winning debates operate as currency. We propose that any movement forward in social justice education requires rethinking these academic economics.
At the same time, we argue for “meaning making” as the most effective starting point for social justice education. Sustaining social justice efforts requires a balancing of meaning-making capacities of the cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal (Kegan, 1994). Instead of political correctness, then, the focus here is on academic correctness. That is, instead of constructing evidence to support one's political dogma, principles of critical theory and transformational learning guide interventions and actions. Learning that reflects on itself is the aim, or what Bateson (1991) calls deutero learning. Critical theorists, similarly, suggest using a constant focus of fundamental assumptions (especially related to power and economics) to deconstruct, contextualize, and recursively reexamine ideas in a manner that resists dogmatic stands in favor of staying awake to the complex interactions that our cognitive schemas too often ignore.
This is, in fact, how we define social justice—it is a means as much as an end. Too often, social justice is defined by what people do or believe; we would agree that actions and beliefs are elements of social justice. But the how is often the missing component. A person can hold good values like equality and fairness, yet fail to live up to the promise of social justice by demanding others accept his or her lens as “objective reality,” painting all critics as oppressors, and/or failing to listen to alternative points of view. We argue for a definition of social justice that includes continual analysis of how people use power, including ourselves. Social justice education, then, is both substantive content and mindful process. It is the recursive illumination of institutional systems and personal biases that inhibit the equitable distribution of resources. And it also requires learning processes that uncover factors inhibiting the full and equal participation of all groups in society.
Another problematic way in which social justice tends to be defined is through the code of “good person cred.” We do not oppose the desire to be good people, but we have observed on too many occasions how this phenomenon creates a political correctness paralysis of sorts, causing students and professors to police both themselves and others. In our experience, attempts at “being a good one” elicit behavioral modeling that leaves more deeply rooted consciousness unexamined. It also belies the reality that each of us, no matter how sophisticated, remains unfinished. If people in academic settings are not allowed to take intellectual risks and try out ideas without being accused of creating unsafe spaces, we risk replicating the same structural oppression we seek to challenge with concepts like academic freedom, free speech, and civil discourse. At its core, Social Justice 2.0 advocates a hard look at the paradigms and systems themselves with the aim of creating more effective means to the end of a sustainable social justice agenda.
A sustainable social justice agenda in the twenty-first century requires this shift for several reasons. First, paradigms that seek to indoctrinate leave social justice educators exposed to attacks from those who complain that higher education underrepresents conservative viewpoints. While we may disagree about whether there is a liberal bias in higher education, we can appreciate the points some critics make about the anti-intellectual impulses that allow some dogmas to be expressed while others are suppressed. We oppose arguments about balance, disagreeing with this as a goal since it would be almost impossible to reach consensus about where the center of an issue might lie. The points about indoctrination and dogma, however, resonate because academic environments must allow the free exchange of ideas regardless of how people feel about them. Retreating into arguments about safe spaces can undermine the intellectual enterprise at the core of any educational institution.
This is not to say that we believe safe spaces have no place in social justice education; in fact, our second reason for advocating Social Justice 2.0 deals directly with the role of emotion as inherent to any change process. Few would argue that social justice education doesn't push buttons; anger, fear, resistance, guilt, shame, and pain are just some of the feelings that students and educators experience as they wrestle with oppression, power, and privilege. To engage deeply with such charged topics, educators must create and hold a context that both challenges and supports students. Too often, students feel set up to fail when they are asked to share openly, but then feel attacked when they do so. Their natural response tends to be withdrawal, for which they are also confronted as an indicator of lack of willingness to own their issues. Part of the Social Justice 2.0 framework we espouse would take an honest look at this dynamic and find ways to reorient the pedagogical model itself toward a less polarizing, more generative approach. Parker Palmer (2007) captured well the connection between the head and heart: “If you introduce a sudden stimulus to an unprepared person, the eyes narrow and the fight or flight syndrome kicks in. But if you train a person to practice soft eyes, then introduce that same stimulus, the reflex is often transcended. This person will turn toward the stimulus, take it in, and then make a more authentic response—such as thinking a new thought” (p. 116). Social Justice 2.0 begins from this position of “soft eyes,” that is, a place of thinking and feeling as fundamentally inseparable processes. Creating safe spaces must extend beyond simply not saying things with which others might disagree into a place of the deeper mutual respect needed to begin any kind of meaningful dialogue. Moreover, we've found that institutional forces can bring both those targeted for and those privileged by oppression into the same conversation. A common focus where structural causes are explored can also illuminate different experiences (and related feelings of both guilt and anger) to begin a discussion of what needs to happen in order to achieve mutual liberation.
Our final reason for advocating Social Justice 2.0 relates to the structures of inequality that get us stuck in the first place. Shaun Harper (2008) offered an excellent example of this phenomenon in a national conference presentation in which he discussed an advertisement that garnered much attention for its racist portrayal. The ad for Intel features a white man standing amidst a group of black men bowing before him (to view the ad, go to http://www.visualnews.com/2010/12/18/tech-ads-that-got-their-plugs-pulled). During his talk, Harper made the point that the creator of this ad went through an educational system that failed to provide the critical thinking skills and awareness necessary to avoid reifying harmful stereotypes. As a result, there is now one more oppressive image in the world, adding to the already overwhelming number of routine ways in which marginalized people are negatively portrayed in our culture. Social Justice 2.0 asks us to both enlarge our screen to include greater consciousness of who is included and remember that technology is only as effective as the person who uses it.
Organization of the Book
Harper's story offers a powerful example of the dangerous cycle that can result when systems are not interrupted on a fundamental level. We must get to the essence to challenge deep-seated, ubiquitous, and taken-for-granted assumptions. In order to shift from vicious cycles to what Senge (1994) calls “virtuous circles,” change has to occur at that most basic systemic level. This is why we begin in Chapter One with an analysis of how we know what we think we know. In this chapter, we posit epistemology as the most fundamental level for change. Positivist epistemological assumptions will continue to have us looking externally for objective truth that diminishes the salience of cultural, historical, and other contextual subjectivities that create and sustain injustice. Until we begin challenging how we know what we know we will continue to accept the terms of faulty systems and end up replicating them even in the process of trying to dismantle them.
Chapter Two serves to crystallize some of the concepts presented in the first chapter, demonstrating how they can serve as a toolkit of sorts for both educators and students. We suggest facility with these concepts as foundational knowledge for making sense of the ways in which privilege and oppression operate, sometimes despite our best efforts. Further, we advocate the contents of this toolkit as a common language for communicating across the incredible complexities that social justice education presents. In this chapter, we strive to provide both the theoretical and practical tools essential to move the social justice discourse forward.
In Chapter Three, we shift from the bigger picture of social justice generally to an examination of higher education's relationship with social justice (and injustice) historically. Effective social justice education begins with an acknowledgment of context, so we believe it is necessary to analyze how higher education institutions have served as vehicles for social justice and/or injustice. None of us operates in a vacuum, yet we sometimes fail to account for the forces that led to a particular conundrum. We seek to elucidate how the history of social justice in higher education continues to shape our social justice education practice in contemporary colleges and universities.
Chapters Four and Five name and address some of the pedagogical and personal challenges that arise for both educators and students participating in social justice education. Social justice educational content tends to confront our mental models and passively received knowledge, requiring alternative pedagogies that can help students manage the complexity of what they are learning. Chapter Four presents the principles of critical pedagogy, which can serve as useful strategies for introducing material that challenges conventional wisdom. Social justice educational content also presents conflicts on the emotional level, a topic addressed in Chapter Five. This chapter aims to assist social justice educators in troubleshooting tensions that naturally arise when institutional power, deeply held beliefs, and identity differences are negotiated. Everyone comes to this work with lived experiences rooted in personal identities and deeply held convictions about appropriate directions to achieve equity, inclusion, and social justice. Our goal in Chapter Five is to facilitate the process of reflecting on our own values and vulnerabilities so that we're not caught off guard in the heated discussions that can serve to either derail or enhance the educational process.
Chapters Six and Seven turn readers' attention to two vital but often overlooked knowledge bases for effective social justice education: media literacy and organizational theory. Chapter Six presents a Media Literacy 101 course of sorts, outlining key concepts and articulating their role as part of a comprehensive social justice curriculum. In Chapter Seven, we focus on the ways organizations themselves promote social injustice through hierarchical structures that centralize some while marginalizing others. We revisit notions of positivism and objective reality from previous chapters, showing how privilege and oppression can be mistaken for neutrality without an eye trained for seeing the ways systems reify the status quo. Frequently, we speak of “the system” in social justice circles without critically examining what systems are and how they operate. Both Chapters Six and Seven provide opportunities and strategies for unmasking the ideologies undergirding major institutions we take for granted in everyday life.
Chapter Eight concludes with an extension of this emphasis on strategy, providing theoretical and concrete ways to move social justice education to the next level. We employ Social Justice 2.0 as a positive, solution-focused way of addressing complex, nuanced twenty-first-century social justice conundrums. We do not suggest we are the first people to own any of these ideas, nor do we aim to characterize all the current social justice education work as “1.0.” The technology metaphor can be extended here; we understand there will be bugs, patches, and newer versions required as our collective thinking about this complex topic evolves. We built this concept on a foundation developed by the many wise, compassionate people whose work we bring together in this book. We drew from interdisciplinary sources, both to add depth and richness to our ideas and to reflect the audience we imagined when writing this work.
Audience and Authors
Returning to the iPad as a metaphor, the tools we present ultimately belong to the people who will use them. We understand the iPad metaphor has its limits. Unlike the iPad, social justice is not a shiny toy one can take out of a box and start to use in a neat and orderly fashion. Who we are and our openness to the process of becoming are much more critical than where we stand or what tools we employ. A plumber without a wrench is weakened, but a plumber who does not know how to use a wrench should probably look for other employment.
While we both work as faculty in student affairs graduate preparation programs, we address this book broadly to faculty, practitioners, and students alike. We recognize the forces that have split our field into dichotomies such as student affairs or higher education, faculty or practitioners, educators or students. We believe these binaries are unhelpful to the educational enterprise, falsely and arbitrarily dividing what is naturally seamless. For example, student affairs work takes place in a higher education context, making the two fields interdependent both academically and politically. Similarly, faculty and practitioners affect one another in profound ways because we know students shift between the curricular and cocurricular multiple times through the day, learning and applying knowledge in both contexts. Finally, we know that in higher education as well as life more broadly, we're both teachers and students frequently, educating and learning from one another in ways far too complex for neat delineation.
Similarly, we position ourselves and readers as both teachers and learners, we do not envision active authors and passive readers, but strive to engage readers as participants through the use of critical questions and reflection opportunities throughout the work. Through these choices, we hope to model some ways in which the conventional lines that separate us might be blurred. So we shift the aforementioned “or” to an “and” sensibility, offering this work to academics and activists, faculty and practitioners, student affairs and higher education scholars, teachers and students. What distinguishes our audience is not the “who” or “what,” but the “how.” We write for those who, like us, struggle with the “how” of social justice education. How do we get unstuck and move social justice education forward in a way that resonates with people in the twenty-first century? How do we reach students and colleagues who think they've heard it all and have tuned out? How do we stay relevant when some social justice issues have confounded us for a long time? How do we keep from replicating the same systems we seek to change through social justice education? Ultimately, we wrote this book for those who, whatever their current position or field, seek fresh thinking about potential answers to these questions.
Acknowledgments
As with any scholarship we've published, this book is the result of numerous teachers who have provided stimulating insights, clarifying challenges, and nurturing compassion during our journey. Some, like bell hooks and Paulo Freire, have stimulated transformational learning through their ideas, while others have listened us into understanding. As important as mentorship and reading are, ultimately students are the ones who made this work possible. They've shared their stories, provided candid answers to what works or doesn't work in their social justice educational experiences, and stuck with us when we were trying to understand a cultural or personality difference, pushed too hard, or didn't listen deeply enough. We wish we had the space to name all the thoughtful, motivated, and inspiring students with whom we've had the privilege of connecting at Stanford, The University of Iowa, Western Illinois University, Ohio University, and the University of San Francisco. We'll have to trust that if you read this, you know we mean you.
Tracy Davis thanks his mentors, Debora Liddell and JQ Adams, who patiently listen, generously support, and appropriately challenge. Social justice is about being authentic, understanding who we are serving, quieting ego, being conscious of injustice in the world, and having the courage to risk—I can think of no better role models in my life than Deb and JQ. Over the years I have engaged in discussions with colleagues who have deepened my understanding of both the personal and institutional dimensions so critical to promoting equity and inclusion. I want to thank Rachel Wagner, Jason Laker, Bob Engel, Tim McMahon, Nicholas Colangelo, Alan Berkowitz, Rickey Hall, and Ron Pettigrew for introducing me to central concepts and walking beside me during critical times of frustration, misunderstanding, and the exultation of deepening consciousness. There are also colleagues at the Center for the Study of Masculinities and Men's Development whose insight, guidance, or friendship helped provide encouragement to complete this project. Thanks to Jim LaPrad, Sean Dixon, Burt Sorkey, Jennie Hemingway, Ron Williams, Keith Edwards, Vern Klobassa, Shaun Harper, Susan Marine, and Byron Oden Shabazz. I value Laura M. Harrison's wit, sense of humor, and collaborative style in writing this book and look forward to future projects. Finally, to Marjorie, Evan and Tyler: thank you for giving me space, sustenance, and support to explore and write. While the personal and professional are deeply intertwined in my work, you help me remember which is central.
Laura M. Harrison thanks her mentor and friend, Yegan Pillay, for his wise counsel and warm support, particularly during her transition to Ohio University. I don't know that I could have written my first book during my first year as faculty without the generous insight and encouragement I can always count on from him. I also want to acknowledge Patti Hanlon-Baker, Pete Mather, Gayle Yamauchi-Gleason, and Bob Young, whose guidance helped me get unstuck in writing, teaching, and life. My stories about their help continue to have a ripple effect as students hear them and realize it might be okay for them to reach out when they get stuck, too.
One of the fundamental strategies for promoting social justice discussed in this book is maintaining a dialectical disposition. This process of recursively challenging perspectives also reflects the way this book was written. The insightful blind reviewers' comments and John Schuh's expert questions and editing suggestions helped us clarify important details and reconsider the articulation of various viewpoints. Our editor, Erin Null, and assistant editor, Alison Knowles, were also instrumental in asking important questions and moving us through the writing process from inception to culmination. We would also like to thank readers who respond to our thoughts expressed in this book as we strive to maintain a dialectical disposition.
About the Authors
Tracy Davis is professor in the Department of Educational and Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Illinois University, where he also coordinates the College Student Personnel Program. In 2011 he began serving as director of the newly established Center for the Study of Masculinities and Men's Development. He has published widely regarding men's development, sexual assault prevention, and social justice. Davis coedited, for example, Masculinities in Higher Education: Theoretical and Practical Considerations with Jason Laker in 2011, coedited the 2013 Critical Perspectives on Gender in Higher Education: An ASHE Reader, and coauthored the New Directions for Social Services monograph Developing Social Justice Allies. His sexual assault prevention research has won numerous awards, including both the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) outstanding dissertation award. Davis was also selected to the inaugural class of ACPA Emerging Scholars in 1999 and has received the ACPA Standing Committee for Men (SCM) Outstanding Research Award, the Commission on Student Development Assessment's Outstanding Assessment Article, and NASPA 2012 Men and Masculinities Knowledge Community Newly Published Research award. He was also selected as a 2013 ACPA Senior Scholar and received both the ACPA Annuit Coeptis award for Senior Scholars and the SCM Harry Canon Outstanding Professional award in 2006. He is a frequent presenter, speaker, and consultant on college campuses. Most important, he remains wildly unfinished.
Laura M. Harrison began her career in student affairs as a practitioner at Ohio University, where she worked in residence life and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) programming. She moved to Stanford University in 2000, where she served as an associate dean of students, Women's Community Center director, resident fellow, and instructor in the Program in Feminist Studies. She also taught courses in leadership and change at the undergraduate, MBA, and doctoral levels at the University of San Francisco from 2006 to 2011. In 2011, she returned to Ohio University to accept the position she currently holds, assistant professor in the Counseling and Higher Education Department. Harrison teaches and writes on the topics of advocacy, change, and leadership in student affairs and higher education. The Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, New Directions for Student Services, and Building Leadership Bridges Series have published her work.
Chapter 1
Uncovering Epistemology
Frameworks Supporting a Change Agenda
The problem is that most of us have spent our lives immersed in analytic knowing, with its dualistic separation of subject “I” and object “it.” There's nothing wrong with analytic knowing. It's useful and appropriate for many activities—for example, for interacting with machines. But if it's our only way of knowing, we'll tend to apply it in all situations.
—Peter Senge (2008, p. 99)
Social justice education will stagnate if we do not challenge our prevailing assumptions about how we know what we think we know. According to Takacs (2002), “simply acknowledging that one's knowledge claims are not universal truths—that one's positionality can bias one's epistemology—is itself a leap for many people, one that can help to make us more open to the world's possibilities” (p. 169). Understanding epistemological frameworks helps us identify assumptions that we may take to be universal truths, just as failing to do so will leave us susceptible to our own limited point of view. Differing ways of knowing are deeply connected to our capacity to effect change. To be an effective change agent means something quite different if one believes truth is objective as opposed to subjective. Wineburg (2001) illustrates this when he states that “the narcissist sees the world—both the past and the present—in his own image. Mature historical knowing teaches us to do the opposite: to go beyond our own image, to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyond the fleeting moment in history into which we have been born. When we develop the skill of understanding how we know what we know, we acquire a key to lifelong learning” (p. 24). We argue that unless we understand how we construct and shape knowledge, we risk reifying the status quo instead of promoting social justice. We can unwittingly work against our aims if we fail to understand our own lens with some degree of humility. Further, failure to acknowledge the subjective nature of knowledge can blind us to potential solutions that exist outside of our limited understanding of an issue. When we consider the common frustration regarding the persistent nature of some social justice issues, we have to wonder if part of the problem lies in failure to innovate, to address concerns in truly new ways that challenge interventions that have perhaps become obsolete.
My (Harrison's) motivation for exploring epistemology no doubt results from my previous job as the director of the Stanford Women's Community Center, where I strove to make advances for women. A big challenge in this career field stems from the reality that women have achieved legal equality and most people believe in gender equity, so the issues are less obvious than they were for people doing this kind of work fifty years ago. Yet concerns about sexism persist with regard to gender parity in higher education. Through my decade-plus experience doing women's advocacy work, it has become clear that the problems that remain in this area are rooted in epistemological concerns. The issue of underrepresentation of senior, tenured women faculty provides a good example of a concern in which a conventional understanding of the nature of knowledge has hindered change efforts. In a gesture undoubtedly motivated by goodwill and sincere desire to remedy a problem, many universities implemented “stop the tenure clock” policies so that women faculty would not be penalized for taking time off to have children. While the policy was helpful in many cases, the narrow focus on the tenure clock is not only limited, but counterproductive in some situations. For instance, if the prevailing paradigm of a department is that serious scholars achieve tenure in X number of years, then a professor faces significant political and professional repercussions for taking leave whether or not it is an official university policy to allow her to do so. In their groundbreaking study of male and female professors' career advancement, Mason, Wolfinger, and Goulden (2013) lauded tenure clock and other efforts aimed at creating more flexible policies for parents. But they also found that policies weren't enough; women continue to shoulder more of the parenthood responsibilities, and they pay the price professionally as a result. These conundrums do not mean a tenure clock policy is not useful; in fact, it may be a logical place to start. But it's not a good place to end: deeper, more substantive change requires the ability to examine what we think we know about academia, men, women, family, and work at their most basic levels.
Scholars have produced volumes of quality literature positing knowledge as a constructed social reality (Berger, 1966; Foucault, 1980; Habermas, 1973; Horkheimer, 1974; Marcuse, 1960). Distilling this literature is beyond the scope of this chapter; however, one goal here is to make the scholarship more accessible, because accessibility is an issue frequently acknowledged in the epistemological discourse (Tyson, 2006; Voronov & Coleman, 2003). The other primary aim of this chapter is to introduce participatory research as a methodological approach useful in addressing complex, long-standing social justice issues. What follows is an analysis of positivist versus postpositivist understandings of knowledge and an introduction to participatory research as an emancipatory epistemological tool. This chapter will explore participatory research's main concepts and analyze how this method can be applied to producing knowledge that yields fresh insights into what S. D. Parks (2005) called “swamp issues,” the places where we get stuck.
Positivism versus Postpositivism
In a popular research textbook, Gall, Gall, and Borg (1999) define positivism as “an epistemological position that asserts that there is a social reality “out there” that is available for study through scientific means similar to those that were developed in the physical sciences” (p. 530). Positivism takes for granted that there is an objective reality that exists independently of contexts like cultural or power differences. Positivism does not deny the existence of culture or power, but it separates these as variables rather than lenses through which reality—and, by extension, knowledge—are constructed. In a positivist paradigm, reality is not constructed; it simply is. As a result, reality is to some degree stagnant because it does not change as the result of our interaction with it. Reality and knowledge exist outside of ourselves in a positivist worldview. We interact with them, to be sure, but we and them are separate entities.
In contrast, postpositivism takes issue with the idea of a baseline reality that transcends difference, particularly differences related to culture and/or power. In a postpositivist framework, reality itself is understood as constructed, which raises questions about the constructor. For example, who has access to education, and are there differences in the quality of educational experience based on who the learner is? Postpositivists tend to acknowledge that the level of access to the construction materials varies according to power; people exist in relation to other people via various hierarchies, even in the flattest of organizations. Position title, where people went to school, level of education attained, political involvement, and family connections are just some of the potential criteria for establishing privilege or marginalization within an institution. Is there a relationship, for example, between ethnicity and educational resources at the primary or secondary school level? Imagining that these distinctions would not affect who gets to define the dominant discourse that shapes educational policy seems illogical, yet the default objective assumption is that there is indeed some sort of power-free, context-free knowledge that prevails purely through its intrinsic merit. Greenfield and Ribbins (1993) suggested a way to examine how power affects the way knowledge is constituted:
We should look more carefully too for differences in objectives among different kinds of people in organizations and begin to relate these to differences in power or access to resources. Although this concept of organization permits us to speak of the dominating demands and beliefs of some individuals, and allows us to explore how those with dominating views use the advantage of their position, we need not think of these dominating views as “necessary,” “efficient,” “satisfying,” or even “functional,” but merely as an invented social reality, which holds true for a time and is then vulnerable to redefinition through changing demands and beliefs among people [p. 17].
