by Jessica Gunzburger
Editor’s note: This article is an adaptation of an excerpt from a chapter in Contested Issues in Troubled Times: Student Affairs Dialogues on Equity, Civility, and Safety edited by Peter M. Magolda, Marcia B. Baxter Magolda, and Rozana Carducci (Stylus Publishing, 2019).
Student affairs graduate education has immense potential to create opportunities for transformational learning and prepare student affairs professionals to promote equity, civility, and safety in higher education contexts. I look back on my own master’s experience with great fondness and nostalgia, having made lifelong friends and learned an immense amount about the profession and myself. However, graduate school is also difficult. Even in ideal circumstances, graduate students are called on to be students and professionals, all while learning about themselves and the profession. This essay explores the responsibility that the student affairs profession, in particular graduate assistantship supervisors and faculty, has to graduate students in the field as they navigate the ambiguity of their roles. I argue that student affairs professionals have a responsibility to help graduate students navigate the challenges of their dual roles as students and emerging professionals. However, this responsibility is not easily fulfilled, and as a profession we often fall short. I outline four key ways that faculty and supervisors can support graduate students in their dual roles and possibilities for how they may approach this work.
Core to my argument is the recognition that graduate students exist in two worlds. They are students in a graduate program, actively engaging in the classroom to learn about themselves, their students, and higher education. Concurrently, graduate students are engaged in day-to-day student affairs work through their assistantships, internships, and/or practica experiences. It is the intersection of these two worlds where the greatest potential for their learning exists. When practical work and coursework complement each other and there is adequate and developmental support, graduate student learning can be immense and effective. However, when there is little support or congruency between the experiences, the ambiguity and stress may be beyond what many graduate students are equipped to manage. The goal for the student affairs profession should be to provide graduate students with the best of both worlds rather than the worst of them.
Helping graduate students navigate these two roles as emerging student affairs professionals is an adaptive challenge.1 Heifetz describes adaptive challenges as problems that are in and of themselves difficult to define, and there is no clear, step-by-step solution. Supporting graduate students is such an adaptive challenge. There is no manual of steps we can follow to effectively help every graduate student navigate the ambiguity of their experiences, and I make no attempt to offer such a list. Rather, I outline how student affairs professionals can help graduate students navigate their dual roles as professionals and students through appropriately scaffolded responsibilities, identity-conscious support, communication between assistantship supervisors and faculty, and quality supervision.
Graduate students are often eager to take on significant work and responsibility as a part of their assistantships, practica, and internships, and many institutions rely on graduate students’ contributions to keep their programs functioning. When these responsibilities are appropriately scaffolded, this relationship can be mutually beneficial to both the department and the graduate student. However, when responsibilities are not intentionally constructed it can be exploitative and harmful both to the graduate students and the individuals they serve.
Appropriately scaffolded responsibilities are a fit for a graduate student’s growth edge.2 This is a mental space where an individual is at the limit of their current developmental capacity or understanding and can grow in that capacity with support from a supervisor. An individual’s developmental capacity represents the meaning-making structure used to make sense of their world.3 In the case of graduate student responsibilities, developmental capacity will affect how a student approaches work and fulfills responsibilities. Faculty and supervisors must actively assess and consider a student’s developmental capacity both to provide sufficient support and assign appropriate tasks to a student. As faculty and supervisors make these decisions, there may be strong pulls from both the graduate student and institutional needs to give the graduate student more responsibility or work than is appropriate. However, it is critical that faculty and supervisors take into account the graduate student’s developmental capacity and knowledge base when determining what an appropriate task or responsibility is for that graduate student.
To better illustrate the importance of assessing developmental capacity when assigning tasks, consider a graduate student who has responsibilities to assist with training for orientation leaders on campus. The work this graduate student takes on should align with their current capacities. A graduate student who operates from a socialized perspective will rely heavily on their supervisor for direction and seek the “right†way to approach a situation.4 Putting such a student in charge of facilitating complex discussions with orientation leaders with much ambiguity and the requirement of sorting through multiple viewpoints where no one is “right†would be beyond that student’s growth edge and not set them up for success. However, this task would be ideal to promote developmental growth for students who are constructing their internal voice and beginning to operate from a self-authored perspective. This opportunity would allow students to hold multiple perspectives and further reflect on their own.5 Ultimately, faculty and supervisors should ask themselves if the graduate student has the developmental capacity necessary to meet the challenges of a given task and, if not, if there is reasonable support from a faculty member or supervisor that can fill in those gaps. For more on how to assess developmental capacity and appropriately coach individuals of different meaning-making structures, see Baxter Magolda and King’s Assessing Meaning Making and Self-Authorship: Theory, Research, and Application6 and Berger’s Changing on the Job.7
When practical work and coursework complement each other and there is adequate and developmental support, graduate student learning can be immense and effective.
A graduate student’s knowledge base also affects what responsibilities and tasks are appropriate. For example, a graduate student who is advising a student government association needs a specific knowledge base to be effective in the role. Does this student have the knowledge of university policies and procedures necessary to responsibly advise this group as they plan initiatives? Does the graduate student have an understanding of how oppression functions so that when a microaggression occurs during an executive board meeting they are able to effectively recognize it and intervene? Does the graduate student have the experience in event planning to make sure that the students organizing an event have adequately prepared for possible issues with the event implementation? Without adequate support and guidance from supervisors, graduate student decisions may contribute to physical and emotional harm of the individuals with whom they work. The graduate student’s supervisor must ask themselves if the graduate student has the necessary knowledge and experience to fulfill their responsibilities and, if not, if they are able to prepare the student with that knowledge.
Graduate students’ identities and the institutional context in which they work fundamentally influence the support and guidance that individuals may need to successfully navigate their dual roles as students and professionals. To ignore the role of identity and systems of oppression is to deny graduate students an equitable experience, particularly when graduate students with minoritized identities are navigating both the graduate experience and systemic oppression. Providing identity-conscious support is challenging given that supervisors and faculty are not always trained to do so, particularly when it is a supervisor or faculty member with a dominant identity working across a power structure to supervise an individual with a minoritized identity. Additionally, identity-conscious support is not often the norm in the field of student affairs, so supervisors and faculty may be going against the grain as they try to embrace such equitable practice. Despite these challenges, identity-conscious support is necessary both for individuals navigating their minoritized identities in student affairs and their dominant ones.
Supervisors and faculty have a responsibility to support students with minoritized identities within their departments and programs. Fundamental to this support is the recognition that these students consistently face oppression in their work and lives. All interactions with and support of students with minoritized identities must take this into account. For instance, supervisors should recognize that an individual with an oppressed identity might spend more time supporting students with the same identity on campus. A hall director who is transgender may spend more time talking with transgender residents of their building because those students seek them out, something their cisgender counterparts do not spend time doing. Supervisors must recognize this additional work that graduate students with minoritized identities often assume on their campuses.
Supervisors and faculty also have a responsibility to provide coaching and mentoring that help graduate students with minoritized identities navigate systems of oppression that permeate student affairs. For instance, one participant in my dissertation study on racism in supervision shared how a white supervisor supported her as a black woman. This supervisor told her to “never get the copies†so she was not seen in a service role, but instead as an equal member of the leadership team.8 This supervisor recognized that the participant’s journey to being a professional and negotiating relationships in the office would be different for her than for her white male peers and provided helpful coaching to help navigate her role.
Faculty and supervisors also have a responsibility to provide identity-conscious support and coaching to students with dominant identities, particularly those supervisors and faculty who share the dominant identity of the graduate student. These authority figures can help graduate students with dominant identities learn how they are complicit in systems of oppression. For example, a white male faculty member may help a white male student realize how he is participating at length in class discussions and taking up a significant portion of the discussion time in class. This conversation can help this white male student see how he is exerting dominance, perhaps without realizing it, and reinforcing systems of power. In another example, supervisors and faculty can help students with dominant identities recognize the privilege they hold within their graduate programs and student affairs. For instance, graduate students are often told that a master’s program is a time of growth where mistakes are an acceptable and a necessary way to learn. However, individuals with marginalized identities often have less space to make mistakes than their peers with privileged or dominant identities. A black woman who makes a mistake, for instance, often cannot do so without it reflecting on others with her identity. A white male making the same mistake, however, does not reflect on his white male peers. Supervisors can help students with dominant identities recognize the privilege they hold and recognize how this may affect their interactions with peers and students with minoritized identities.
At their best, graduate experiences have near-seamless integration of assistantship and classroom experiences. Research indicates that when this integration occurs, graduate students are best prepared to advance into full-time professional work.9 The cycle of learning between the classroom and assistantship creates many opportunities for learning but can only be maximized when assistantship supervisors and faculty communicate and coordinate to intentionally shape a graduate experience. If this intentional communication is not present, these two facets of the experience can be at odds rather than synergistic.
There are multiple reasons that make strong communication between assistantship supervisors and faculty difficult. Time is a limiting factor for all involved. Few student affairs professionals have extra time in their schedules to reach out to faculty members. For faculty, it can be time-intensive to coordinate with multiple assistantship departments and supervisors. Additionally, the work of coordinating with assistantship supervisors is not typically rewarded in tenure processes. In short, there are competing priorities for both faculty and assistantship supervisors that make communication challenging.
Despite these challenges, faculty and assistantship supervisors can make strides in improving communication in a number of ways. First, these two groups can make sure they have clear expectations for graduate students that do not create a conflict between assistantships and academic programs. For instance, a graduate student may want to participate in a Black Lives Matter protest on their campus. They may receive contradictory messages from assistantship and academic departments on whether it is appropriate or allowed to participate in a protest given the student’s dual staff and student status. Faculty and student affairs professionals can alleviate the stress and challenge that graduate students may face in trying to navigate these contradictory expectations by communicating proactively with each other.
Another reason for consistent and clear communication between assistantship providers and faculty surrounds the many and sometimes competing expectations and tasks for graduate students. Managing multiple priorities is difficult for many seasoned student affairs professionals, let alone graduate students new to the field. Handling workloads from assistantships, internships, practica, and coursework challenges many graduate students.10 Student affairs professionals can support graduate students by making sure each aspect of their graduate school experience has reasonable expectations that complement each other. This coordination does not mean that each assistantship experience needs to be the same – there will be natural variety among assistantship experiences.
There are many ways communication between assistantship supervisors and faculty may take shape, and the exact approach will depend on many factors (e.g., number of assistantship sites, number of students in the program, number of faculty). However, a few approaches may be helpful. Faculty and assistantship supervisors can hold meetings two to three times a year to talk about big-picture issues that face graduate students in their programs and departments, such as the expectations and time commitment clarifications already outlined. A part of these conversations can be establishing points of contact in anticipation of concerns arising throughout the year. It may also be helpful for each student to have an assistantship contract outlining their responsibilities and the hours they spend working on a weekly basis. This approach may help prevent students from going down the slippery slope of working far more hours within their assistantship than intended.
Thus far I have repeatedly brought up the role that supervisors within assistantships, internships, and practica play in graduate students’ lives. Although supervision has been frequently mentioned, it bears explicit and individual discussion here as well. Many individuals have substantial influence on a graduate student’s experience, but supervisors have the unique opportunity to be in frequent and individual communication with graduate students through one-to-one meetings and assistantship work on a daily basis. Multiple studies point to how much influence a supervisor has on a supervisee’s experience,11 and this may be particularly true for graduate students and new professionals.12
Supervision is itself an adaptive challenge, one that demands a great deal of graduate students’ supervisors. Moreover, many supervisors of graduate students were recently graduate students themselves and still grapple with some of the same growth challenges as the individuals they supervise. On top of all of this, student affairs professionals are rarely prepared to be good supervisors. Despite the ubiquitous nature of supervision in our field, little attention is paid to good supervision in the literature, graduate preparation programs, or training.13 This lapse in supervisor preparation means that graduate students’ supervisors are often ill-prepared to support them in their roles and the immense growth they are experiencing.
Providing quality supervision is a nuanced and complex task and beyond the scope of this essay. What I focus on instead is how, as a field, we need to increase the time and energy we spend on preparing supervisors so they can most effectively support graduate students. Key to this effort is investing in the development of student affairs professionals as supervisors. This can begin in graduate preparation programs as individuals learn about themselves and others (e.g., developmental capacity, social identities). Once in the field, professionals need to engage in ongoing training and development. This can take the form of reading groups, workshops, webinars, conference sessions, and individual development in one-to-one meetings.
Many graduate students face significant challenges navigating their roles as students in an academic program and professionals in their assistantships, practica, and internships. Although difficult, existence in these two worlds provides myriad opportunities for learning and growth. Although graduate school can certainly be a time of intense growth, growth does not need to be traumatic or consistently overwhelming. As a student affairs profession, we have a responsibility to help graduate students navigate these multiple roles so they get the best of both of these worlds rather than the worst of them. This can happen in many ways, including appropriately scaffolded responsibilities, identity-conscious support, communication between assistantship supervisors and faculty, and provision of quality supervision. Given that graduate students continue on to become the leaders of our profession and have profound influence over how undergraduate students learn within our higher education institutions, the field of student affairs has a responsibility to help them navigate the ambiguity of their roles in order to maximize their learning and continue to be at their best throughout their years in the profession.
NOTES:
Jessica Gunzburger is a residential life coordinator at the University of Minnesota. She earned her Ph.D. from Miami University where her dissertation research addressed cross-racial supervision of professionals in student affairs and how racism influences those relationships. jgunzbur@umn.edu
