An Upside to 2020: Greater Focus on Positionality

While the uncertainty of the year 2020 brought discomfort and grief, we gained the opportunity to think differently about our systems and our culture. As a former academic advisor, I welcome this challenge to stretch. I bring five years of professional and graduate higher education experience to my role as a Client Success Coordinator with RHB having served in a multifaceted academic advising role for a small academic department at a large research institution. In an academic department with practices that were likely in place in the 1960s, the events of 2020 put a quick halt to those legacy procedures and paved the way for innovation. The greatest outcome of the changes 2020 forced my institution to consider was truly centering the experience of every student. We worked tirelessly to accommodate blended learning models and unique housing requests to ensure the 2020 events did not prevent the opportunity to learn.

I hope every campus can carry this challenge forward and continue to dismantle hurdles that may be preventing students from engaging in their learning. Admissions processes and requirements throughout this recruitment cycle are a clear example: waived or optional ACT/SAT score requirements, virtual visits, virtual interviews and holistic applications, are but a few examples. While many institutions were taking critical steps to increase access well before the global pandemic, the events of 2020 punctuated the additional work necessary to ensure students who have been admitted have the support they need to navigate through the challenges a college transition brings.

As one instance, at my previous institution, a holistic approach to application review was employed which allowed students to present themselves in various ways: performance, aptitude, and engagement. These criteria lean into the eight non-cognitive variables to measure ability and success developed by William Sedlacek ( 2004 ). These eight variables include confidence, realism in understanding how to assess strengths and weaknesses, how to navigate a system not intended for all folks with marginalized identities, long term goals, a support person, non-traditional evidence of leadership, community involvement, and non-curricular knowledge. Sedlacek ( 2004 ) argues that measuring for these variables through interviews, essays, conversations and various other methods paint a broader picture of a student’s likelihood of success. Assessing non-cognitive variables also acknowledges non-traditional measures of success that students with historically marginalized identities bring in addition to their academic abilities. Employing non-cognitive assessment ensures non-cognitive difficulties are documented for all students in addition to cognitive challenges. Sedlacek advises colleges and universities to employ these variables as a means for retention and success in the classroom. This last and most critical step to propel a student in their persistence toward the finish line is where I particularly found gaps in my time working in academic affairs.

Student affairs, enrollment management, academic advising and academic affairs professionals are well aware of the implications of developing diverse ways to measure, track and assess student success. In my experiences on four very distinct college campuses, many of my colleagues lacked practices to employ or even to get started in their respective functional areas. The admissions process—and the requirements of that process—is a natural place to begin, but it cannot end there. Faculty, staff, community partners, parents and families all need to be invited into this conversation about creating an environment that fosters diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the institution. While assessment of student success lies mostly in the domain of academic achievement and co-curricular involvement, these efforts will only become regular practice if they are part of the culture of the organization.

Let’s Make This Practical

The holistic application is a necessary and important tool to broaden and diversify a class of students of course, but what happens once those students step on campus? Are faculty prepared to diversify their curriculum and pedagogical practices to reflect the new class of students? Are academic advisors equipped to affirm a students’ non-traditional knowledge and how that might translate to how they approach the classroom experience? Are parents and families aware of how holistic your review process has become? Is your institution prepared to offer a variety of support options for the more diverse class of students to successfully meet the challenges they will face both academically and socially on your campus? As students are coming into college increasingly more aware of their positionality in the institutional environment, you will need to begin to answer these questions with evidence.

Here’s a story that shocked me because it revealed how the things we often overlook are indicators of how authentic the university’s efforts towards creating an inclusive culture actually are. In my role as an advisor, I was also the primary recruiting professional on behalf of the department. With state of the art technology and facilities, showing students around the department’s academic space always produced excitement. One of our visitors later pointed out a detail that was particularly influential in the decision to enroll: a Safe Zone sticker on my office door. The Safe Zone Project conducts an LGBQT+ ally training program. I was shocked by this because this little sticker is what I believed to be such a small detail of what they saw on their tour, yet it left such an impact. And that wasn’t the extent of this student’s awareness of how their identity would be supported on campus. This student arrived on-campus for their tour with a community developed through an affinity group they connected with through the Pride Center Facebook page. They were also compelled by the gender neutral housing options. With a space and community honoring their identity, they were intrigued by the institution, but what was most critical to this student was the inclusivity in the department. My little two-inch circular sticker was the academic department’s only visible evidence of LGBTQ+ inclusivity.

Who, what, and where on-campus do these increasingly diverse students go and show up as their authentic selves? If these people, places and details exist on campus, where can students find evidence they are there? To find and amplify these, we need more than holistic and inclusive practices in scattered departments. We need a culture shift. We need a culture that centers the experience on the student and all of their identities, all of the time. This culture shift is one I believe higher ed has launched, due at least in part to the challenges 2020 forced institutions to make. Continuing to reflect on how student centered our practices can be will not only yield more diverse classes of students, but also graduate more diverse classes of students. Let’s rise to this opportunity.

Reference:
Sedlacek, W. E. ( 2004a ). Beyond the big test: Noncognitive assessment in higher
education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.