Student Affairs Practitioners Research Articles

Themes on Black college males’ mental health and future directions for research in student services

AbstractIn this article, we discuss major themes on Black males’ mental health that have emerged from this monograph. We will also discuss and emphasize how various institutional agents such as student affairs practitioners, faculty, and administrators can use this information to better support Black males in higher education. Finally, we will also discuss implications for future research in student services.

An overview of Black males and mental health in higher education: Implications for practice and research

AbstractThis article discusses some critical underlying factors that facilitate mental health concerns for Black males in higher education. This article also focuses on the role that student affairs practitioners and faculty can play in supporting Black males on college campuses with mental health needs. This article concludes with recommendations and critical research to further research and practice.

Engaging in the scholarship of practice: Examples from the field

AbstractThis article highlights several examples of student affairs practitioners and graduate preparation faculty engaging in the scholarship of practice. In doing so, these individuals merit a designation as scholars of practice because they are conducting research using their disciplinary knowledge and skill to address an institutional problem or inform future student affairs practice.

"It's Not Therapy, But It Feels Right": A Duoethnography on Trauma and Healing in the Student Affairs Profession

Abstract: In this duoethnography, the co-authors share their experiences and reactions to trauma as student affairs practitioners in the wake of a car and knife attack at Ohio State University. Our goal in sharing these stories is for readers to join us as collegiate educators in this journey of exploring trauma and the healing process. We want to continue normalizing conversations about trauma, acknowledge the differences in trauma healing due to existing systems of oppression, and encourage readers to consider how we can better support trauma survivors in higher education. We offer considerations for practice moving forward and hope that others can find support and affirmation through the conversations in this study.

Leading higher education transformation: The role of student affairs

Student affairs practitioners and researchers are well positioned to contribute holistically tostudent success and as such could play a strategic role in the transformation of higher education.The aim of this article is to illustrate that a key strategic objective of student affairs is to contributesignificantly towards student success. This article reports on a study (January, 2021) entitled ‘Towardsa qualitative framework for blending equity and excellence in transforming South African highereducation transformation to achieve development’ in which the promotion of student success isviewed as central to institutional transformation. The purpose of the study was to contribute to amore comprehensive qualitative framework for higher education transformation in South Africa byreconciling notions of ‘equity and excellence’. Interviews were conducted with sixteen leaders in thefield of higher education in South Africa. Thereafter, interview data were triangulated with strategicdocuments of various entities concerned with higher education transformation. The theoreticalframework encapsulated the human capital and human capability theories and argues further fora reconciliation of these theories to promote social justice and human well-being. The study usedgrounded theory methods to analyse and present the comprehensive qualitative framework. Thestudy found that student success was the most critical factor driving institutional transformation. Inaddition, four other interrelated elements were presented as the core elements of a comprehensiveframework. Based on these findings, this article explores the implications for student affairs further,using unpublished input gathered by the author through reflective conversations with stakeholdersat the University of Cape Town. In this regard the notion of a set of student learning imperatives(graduate attributes) becomes relevant to the discussion when student affairs practitioners andresearchers collaborate with faculties and departments on strategic projects.

Challenge or Support? Exploring Academic Burnout in Residential Learning Communities

Abstract: Residential learning communities (RLCs) are on-campus programs aimed at seamlessly blending the in- and out-of-class experiences for college students. Scholars have demonstrated how RLC initiatives are valuable because they build and reinforce an academic environment, and help facilitate related outcomes (e.g., academic transition, GPA, critical thinking). With such an emphasis on aligning academic and residential experiences for students, this article explored if RLC participants were susceptible to higher rates of academic burnout. Using survey data to assess RLC and non-RLC students, we established that participation was not associated with meaningful differences in academic burnout. Conversely, by measuring thriving we also determined that the ways students experience success in RLCs is in fact different than their non-RLC counterparts. Student affairs practitioners can better understand how their students experience burnout when they also understand how their students succeed, as demonstrated in the study’s findings. Recommendations to alleviate burnout while promoting success are discussed in light of RLC participation.

Building the Bridge: Practical Considerations for Student Affairs Practitioners and Faculty to Support Black Students in First Year Seminars

Black students are enrolling in college at higher rates than they have ever done in the past. This scholarship provides a new way of thinking and conceptualizing first year seminars for Black student support. The article provides inclusive strategies and practices in the development of faculty and student affairs advisors as they support student learning and development.

Containing the Multitudes

A growing body of scholarship has examined different aspects of the international student experience in higher education institutions, yet few studies have critically interrogated the very concept of the “international student” itself. In this article, we consider the different ways in which politico-legal practices of boundary-making have produced categorization schemes that demarcate the boundary between the national “Self” and the international “Other.” These legal categories of the “domestic” and “international” student serve as the discursive grid through which student populations are rendered legible by university administrators, student affairs practitioners, and scholars. We argue that the socio-cultural worlds of international students are not reducible to the homogenizing logics of politico-legal and institutional categorization, and that they should be reimagined through a pluriversal lens – where multiple worlds of difference can co-exist in spite of persistent efforts to contain the multitudes within the rigid, fixed, and mutually exclusive categories of the nation-state.

All-gender restrooms: Embracing change in the built environment

As architects and designers, we face design challenges that are rooted in the built condition. In our collaboration with student activities professionals, the effective use of space to service, engage, and welcome the campus community is at the forefront of design and planning discussions. We must consider the social implications of our physical designs that evolve as social and cultural norms change. One such topic of extended conversation is the all-gender restroom which has been a topic of conversation in the projects we are designing over the last decade. This piece will help bridge the gap between student affairs practitioners and architectural designers with information and understanding of how code influences the design of all gender restrooms, so that campus communities are better prepared to advocate for their needs in building all gender restrooms.

"The Beacon on Campus": How an Autism-Specific Community College Support Program Addresses Ableism and Autism Acceptance

Autism-specific college support programs (ASPs) are emerging to create more equitable transitions into higher education for autistic students. Such programming is necessary to guide autistic students' journeys as they navigate academia with greater agency. This case study, drawing on the social justice model of disability, explores how an ASP works to dismantle ableism on a community college campus. Findings suggest how the ASP gained legitimacy, surmounted challenges, and promoted autism acceptance in its quest to disrupt institutional ableism and, consequently, transform its campus into a more welcoming space for autistic students. Student affairs practitioners can draw on findings to eradicate ableist practices and messaging within their campus spaces.

Theory-driven approach to developing socially responsible leadership among college students who mentor: Congruence

T he Social Change Model of Leadership (SCM) is the most widely used student leadership development model in higher education. Therefore, the purpose of the current paper is to share a theory-driven approach to developing Congruence, an individual value of the SCM. We discuss the development and implementation of a two-part virtual leader development intervention focused on college students who mentor K-12 youth. Part One was a virtual, twohour content block in the fall with interactive activities. Part Two was a small-group, virtual meeting in the spring with in-depth discussions. The intervention focused on recognizing congruent leadership and considering a situation from multiple values. The intervention was evaluated based on the learning objectives, and mentors perceived notable growth. The purpose of the current scholarship-to-practice brief is that leadership educators and student affairs practitioners can utilize the curriculum to facilitate and evaluate a Congruence intervention in a curricular or co-curricular setting.

Structural Competency: A Framework for Racial Justice Intervention in Student Affairs Preparation and Practice

Higher education practices and policies are rooted in racism and imperialism. This causes physical and emotional harm to BIPOC students. Yet, student affairs practitioners and higher education leaders struggle to stay conscious of the relationships between macro structures of oppression and their deleterious educational, economic, health, and social consequences, when it comes time to assess, understand, and intervene in campus crises and racialized violence. Borrowing from the medical field, this paper offers “structural competency” as a framework for student affairs education and practice toward supporting practitioners prepared to mitigate systemic racism and to identify the social determinants of inequity. Structural competency in student affairs means having the capacity to understand and take actions toward addressing the root causes of BIPOC students’ marginalization in historically white campus contexts. It requires deep attention to how these causes—polices, institutional norms, infrastructures, and the hegemonic beliefs embedded in our economic, social, and political systems—interact with students’ lived experiences on campus. Guided by a Critical Race Theory lens, structural competency moves us toward confronting the downstream consequences of upstream decisions such as admissions standards that disenfranchise BIPOC students, or how the federal financial aid formula fails to account for equity in home ownership which disproportionately harms Black families for the benefit of white ones, because of antiblack U.S. policies such as redlining, making college less accessible for BIPOC students. This paper argues that such a structural competency framework and mindset in policy and practice is crucial for higher education leaders confronting systemic institutional policies that have a cumulative and ongoing oppressive impact on BIPOC students.

Unsettling Assessment Thought and Practice

Unsettling Assessment Thought and Practice Dana M. Malone (bio) and James D. Breslin (bio) Assessment is not working. Not for us as scholars and practitioners, our institutions, our shared values, or the students. While commonly characterized as an "other duty as assigned" or looked upon with derision by overworked faculty and practitioners, assessment is a core component of our work that threads through all areas and responsibilities. It serves as a foundational element for making decisions, yet assessment thought and practice rely on racist, Western, patriarchal, and positivist roots. It is time that we, as a field and a community, committed to supporting all humans in reaching their full potential, address the ways assessment serves to reify and reproduce structural inequity, white supremacy, and colonized thought. We acknowledge and honor that we are not the first to recognize this tension and to call for change. Leathwood (2005, p. 310) accurately observed that "assessment has served, alongside a discourse of meritocracy, to legitimize and rationalize the unequal distribution of power and resources in society." Moreover, the guiding document for ACPA's Strategic Imperative on Racial Justice and Decolonization (Quaye et al., 2018) challenges us to center love in a possibility framework and actively seek to unsettle neoliberal practices in support of indigenizing our work. This approach stands in contrast to the ways white supremacy and positivism reinforce hierarchies of knowledge, positional power dynamics, and efficiency of systems over human growth. Even as assessment thought has begun to evolve more rapidly in recent years through concepts of culturally responsive and socially just assessment (Montenegro & Jankowski, 2020), we find that too often in practice this effort is still reduced to minor tweaks. These systems of power and oppression serve to inhibit change, obscuring what may be possible and reducing the potential for meaningful movement by naturalizing incremental approaches (Bourdieu, 1977; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). As we join these calls for change, we also acknowledge our roles as two scholars and practitioners in dismantling white supremacy and colonized thought. We have labored collaboratively for more than a decade to understand, innovate on, and evolve assessment. Our social identities situate us in this conversation. As we name the limits of language and labels to capture these locations, we offer that I (Malone) am a white, second-generation Armenian American, heterosexual, cisgender, woman, first-generation graduate student, and qualitative researcher, and I (Breslin) am a white, heterosexual, cisgender, man, qualitative researcher, and social constructivist. With a commitment to the transformative ability of our field, we understand that this call requires more than a slow and steady reworking of assessment. Instead, we advocate for moving beyond assessment thought and practice as our field currently conceptualizes it, a rethinking of its nature, role, and function. [End Page 114] THE CURRENT CLIMATE The demand for assessment data is growing exponentially. One aspect of the current situation is clear: assessment is an externally driven component of our work, too often characterized by a check-the-box mentality. Amid the need to validate the worth of a college degree, higher education developed a "culture of compliance" (Kuh et al., 2015, p. 5). Assessment, done in this manner and in service to outside entities, is an addendum, layered on top of the work, or worse yet, disconnected entirely from those directly responsible for student learning—faculty and student affairs practitioners (Kuh et al., 2015; Henning & Roberts, 2016). Beyond a "culture of compliance," the push for evidence of student learning to satisfy accreditors and secure funding cemented the association between assessment and learning. McArthur (2016), therefore, argued assessment has become "one of the most powerful drivers of student learning" (p. 967). McArthur also asserted (which is a fulcrum of this entire discussion for us), "if assessment is the key driver of how and what students learn, then it must also be fundamental to the relationship between student learning and social justice" (2016, p. 967). ENVISIONING WHAT COULD BE While assessment may have emerged from a human desire to understand learning, contemporary assessment is myopically focused on a culture of compliance. Understanding that assessment is and likely will continue to be connected explicitly to budgets, positions, and other neoliberal mechanisms of the academy, our vision...

Assessing Student Affairs Practitioners’ Knowledge, Opinion, and Actions Around College Student Suicide

Since 2010, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts among college students have increased. Student affairs (SA) practitioners may not have received sufficient training to handle issues regarding student suicidality. Results of a survey of SA professionals across the United States assessing their knowledge, opinions, and actions taken around student suicide indicate that formalized training is needed for suicidal warning signs and action plans for suicidal students.

The cost of professional helping in higher education

AbstractIt is estimated that over half of college student affairs practitioners support students through traumatic life events on at least a monthly basis. This level of trauma exposure leaves professionals at risk of experiencing secondary traumatic stress (STS), or the distress that results from helping, or wanting to help, a person experiencing trauma. Unfortunately, little is known about the impact of this phenomenon within the context of student affairs work. This article seeks to shed light on the nature and impact of STS within the context of college student affairs work, as well as explore ways to identify and address the negative impacts of professional helping. The article ends with practical recommendations for individual practitioners, supervisors, organizational leaders, and the profession at‐large.

Feminist Supervision in Higher Education as a Protective Factor for Indirect Trauma

The empathic demands facing student affairs practitioners can cause significant emotional distress that some may experience as trauma. Supervision may mitigate this distress, but student affairs supervisors are often ineffective. This pilot study was conducted by scholar–practitioners who explored the connections between feminist praxis in supervision, professional quality of life, and indirect trauma in higher education contexts using critical quantitative methodology. Findings indicated that feminist supervision is significantly associated with lower levels of burnout and that a workshop intervention was successful in increasing student affairs supervisors' use of feminist supervisory behaviors. Because student affairs supervision literature rarely accounts for the impact of identity and individuals from minoritized groups experience a greater burden from indirect trauma, this study has important implications for advancing justice and equity in higher education practice.

Applied learning and student views of social and political involvement

ABSTRACT While levels of civic engagement among undergraduate students in the United States have increased, understanding how applied learning experiences might facilitate or hinder promotion of civic attitudes, or personal importance of social and political involvement, can provide insights for both faculty and student affairs practitioners. Using longitudinal data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education in the United States, this analysis examined the relationship between undergraduate participation in forms of applied learning and students’ fourth-year attitudes toward the importance of social and political involvement. Results suggested that participating in out-of-class experiences which applied classroom learning, volunteer opportunities, completion of a community project, and study abroad were all positively associated with higher levels of the importance students placed on their social and political involvement.

Mapping African Student Affairs Research during the Past Interlude (2008-2019) through Bronfenbrenner’s Lens

The research question we pursued was: What are the variations in the themes of research in the African higher education context that will enable researchers to promote student development? This contribution addresses three aspects of student affairs research in the African higher education context. First, it commences with tracing the African position with a document analysis of 121 student affairs research articles published in 34 peer-reviewed journals over the past interval (2008-2019). Secondly, the thematic categorization of the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS 2019) was used to determine international publication trends as derived from this document analysis. Thirdly, we applied Bronfenbrenner’s Person-Process-Context-Time (PPCT) model, as an appropriate umbrella research design and guiding framework to review the mapping of African student affairs research. From a comparison between the international CAS categorization and the African categorization, it was concluded that the CAS mapping was largely confirmed by the African analysis, with nine main themes as the foci. Additionally, it was found that four first-hand African themes have not found in the CAS categorization, and significantly limited research was conducted into post-graduate programmes and services (hereafter referred to as PGP's, despite the demands for increased enrolments. The findings suggest that more accurate and continuous mapping of the field can assist policymakers, managers and student affairs practitioners in making more informed choices on supporting growth and development in African higher education, with special emphasis on postgraduate students.

Experiences of Student Affairs Professionals in Facilitating Co-Curricular Leadership Development Programmes in South African Universities

Despite the important role that student affairs practitioners play in supportinguniversities to produce well-rounded graduates, few studies have beenconducted on their lived experiences. This article examines the challengesconfronted by these professionals in interacting with student leadersand facilitating leadership programmes in South African universities. Aqualitative methodology was adopted and semi-structured interviews wereconducted with 20 student affairs practitioners responsible for facilitatingstudent leadership development programmes. A focus group discussionwas also held with six student affairs experts. The findings point to a lackof seamlessness in the structure, staffing, and operation of these programmes,as well as a lack of university support to professionalise student affairs.Furthermore, student leadership development programmes werefound to lack proper theoretical grounding.
 Key words: Student leadership development programmes, students,student affairs professionals

Boyeristic Tendencies: A Look into the Life History of the Student Affairs Scholar-Practitioner

The purpose of this study was to provide more insight into the skills and support systems needed to encourage scholarship among student affairs practitioners. We used topical life history to examine the scholarly lives of eight student affairs practitioners. To guide that examination, we leveraged the questions posed by Jablonski et al. (2006) as our research questions: “What skills and knowledge [did] practitioners need to develop a scholarship agenda?" and "What support, coaching, and job modifications create[d] environments for practitioners to be successful” (p. 197). Participant life histories revealed a variety of direct and indirect influences, such as institutional context, mentorship, personal characteristics, and significant others on the participants' work as student affairs practitioners. The findings highlighted the following as major influences on the professionals’ decision to engage and sustain scholarship: community, intrinsic motivation, and cultural change. What these findings also suggest is practitioners are willing and desirous to make an impact on the broader field through scholarly engagement; they just need support and compelling reasons to do so.