Conceptualizing Student Affairs Graduate Preparation as Activity System(s)

Graduate preparation programs serve as a primary site for training new student affairs practitioners. However, scholars perennially raise concerns about the effectiveness of such graduate training and the readiness of new student affairs practitioners for the field. Whereas existing graduate preparation scholarship relies almost exclusively on a socialization framework, alternative theoretical frameworks oriented toward student learning can offer new insight into training individuals to do student affairs work. Utilizing existing literature on student affairs graduate preparation and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), this article offers a conceptual model of student affairs graduate preparation as sociocultural activity systems. This model maps dimensions of the coursework and fieldwork environments that graduate student navigate during their training and highlights the sociocultural contradictions that emerge within and between each of these environments. Finally, the article provides discussion of how the conceptual model can guide future research on graduate training and strengthen student learning and development within training programs

The Developmental Path of the Lawyer

My mother does not drive, and I own a towel that I cannot use-these are my reasons for studying law. I am an integrated tapestry of elation and disappointment, risk and reward, ambiguity and conviction .. .. I discovered [through adversity] that transitional challenges were not permanent impediments to my progress, but were instead emboldening catalysts to my personal evolution and professional development. These two stories come from admissions essays submitted by members of Georgetown University Law Center\u27s class of 2014, recently published in the Law Center\u27s alumni magazine. The published essays provide fascinating views into the personal experiences and deep reflection that lead people to pursue legal studies

Equipped for Change: A Grounded Theory Study of White Antiracist School Leaders’ Attitudes and Perceptions of Racial Consciousness in Educational Leadership

There is substantial evidence that issues of race and racism and are common in U.S. public schools, especially those greatly impacted by poverty and racial segregation. Unfortunately, it is highly likely many of these occurrences either go unrecognized, unacknowledged, or are perpetrated unknowingly by White educators and administrators—many of whom are well-intentioned, but lack the critical lens necessary in challenging and dismantling them. For White people, the enculturating normativity of White racial dominance, maintained by the social conditioning of Whiteness, facilitates an environment of racial ignorance and insignificance, leaving most painfully oblivious to the damaging complexities of racism in contemporary American society. The purpose of this qualitative study is to illuminate the perceptions and experiences of selected White school leaders who have committed themselves to (a) antiracist school leadership identity development, and (b) the promotion of racially-just school cultures. Responses to semi-structured interview questions were coded, analyzed, and organized into themes to generate an educational leadership theory. Constructivist grounded theory (CGT) methodologies, critical race theory (CRT), critical whiteness studies (CWS), and critical pedagogy (CP) informed the data collection methods and theoretical foundations of this study. Findings revealed a need to reexamine and revise existing antiracist education psychology and pedagogy with an emphasis on cohesion and clarity of purpose. This study contributes new knowledge and insight into the struggle to successfully implement effective, sustainable antiracist school efforts capable of establishing and normalizing racial equity in public education

Locating Themselves: Black Womxn’s Geographies of Professional Socialization

This paper presents findings from a larger study that explored the relationship among Black graduate womxn’s (BGW) geospatial and social locations in their academic organizations, their professional socialization processes, and their abilities to access their desired career pipelines upon program completion. More specifically, it is concerned with manners in which Black womxn (co-)construct geographies for their professional growth that (a) retain Black womxnhood at their centers – and in doing so, (b) challenge academia’s dominant discourses about students’ socialization processes and outcomes. The study took place in a highly ranked college of education (“the College”), at a highly regarded predominately-white public research institution in the American Midwest (“Midwest”). I conducted the study using a bricolage approach. Black Critical Race Theory, postcolonialism, and ideas about everyday resistance informed the paper’s methodology. The findings illustrate a theorizing of Black womxn’s created geographies as sites of resistance, and their liberatory imaginations, against anti-Black and colonial violence in the education academy. They also offer implications for how academia must evolve its understandings, structures, locations, and practices of graduate studies to be more responsive to the evolving needs of a diversifying population of learners and professionals

The Kids are Alt-Right: A Review of Authoritarian Attitudes in Young Adults

The aim of this literature review will attempt to identify and establish a series of research avenues from the existing publications related to the study of authoritarianism that could be used to prepare the reader and researchers to identify the causal pathways that have led to the resurgence of latent racist attitudes among young white men in recent years. The first section of this paper will explore the historical origins of the study of authoritarian personality types through the work of Adorno, while paying close attention to the development of authoritarian attitudes rooted in early childhood experiences. The second section of this review will examine the evolution of the study of authoritarian personality types, and the newly established measures of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation crafted by Altemeyer, along with Sidanius and Pratto. This section will closely examine recent discoveries that have connected the central tenets of RWA and SDO to racial prejudice and anti-egalitarian attitudes, and how a combination of these measures can be reliably operationalized for the purposes of identifying authoritarian attitudes among young men today. The third portion of this review will explore the role of racialization in American policy decision-making, and the overlap between racist attitudes, RWA and SDO through the works of Huddy and Feldman, Tesler, and Hetherington and Weiler

Against Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to apply the negative dialectics of critical theory to the intersection of race, law, and power in the pursuit of racial and ethnic equality in Western society. That is to say, critical race theorists seek to convict Western society for not identifying with their values due to the prevalence of racial and ethnic oppression and subordination in the society. I argue here that this pursuit of racial emancipation and anti-subordination through the negative dialectics of critical theory by critical race theorists offers a false sense of racial difference which is convicting the values of the West for an alternative ontology and epistemology upon which to re-constitute its ideals in particular and society in general. I conclude that the postmodern/ poststructural emphasis on the politics of the racial and ethnic physical bodies as offering an ontological and epistemological difference from the episteme of the West is baseless. The tenets of critical race theory are a reflection or inversion of the values and ideals of the West against themselves for their non-identification, and do not offer an oppositional alternative discourse from which to replace Western ontology and epistemology for its oppression and subordination against humanity and the earth. As such, I conclude that critical race theory is a conservative discourse that offers no real substantive solution to the crisis facing humanity and the earth in the face of the Protestant Ethic and spirit of capitalism’s exploitation and oppression. In fact, I want to go so far as to suggest that CRT prevents social change amidst the social and ecological devastation Western episteme has unleashed unto the world