by Em Camden Doolittle and Leota Wilson
Events of recent years have elevated a number of words within our collective vocabulary. Among those is social justice, a concept arguing that all people are worthy of an equitable distribution of rights and opportunities. In many ways, student affairs has been ahead of the curve as campuses have been integrating social justice education within their residential education divisions. This should not be surprising, considering the student-focused, community-oriented work that these professionals perform on a daily basis. Residential education professionals are responsible for building welcoming communities grounded in respect and often literally are living on the front lines with students possessing a multitude of identities, experiences, and needs.
The ongoing evolution of weaving social justice into the fabric of higher education is the basis for the book Why Aren't We There Yet? Taking Personal Responsibility for Creating an Inclusive Campus. One of the fundamental jobs of residential education is to create communities that empower a student to live out their identities and stories authentically, especially given today’s realities of unmet basic needs, unchecked privilege, and institutionally entrenched barriers to success. Out of this compassionate work, along with social justice-specific curricula in graduate preparation programs, have grown robust social justice education initiatives that create what the book refers to as “a truly welcoming and inclusive environment,” which is further defined as a space “where difficult conversations are the norm, and individuals are empowered to notice, question, and stop inequality.”
With the importance of social justice education for students broadly accepted within student affairs, there has been a growing shift towards residential education that focuses specifically on social justice education for students and other professionals or divisions focusing on internal trainings for staff about social justice topics. As one example, at the University of California-Davis, within the student housing and dining services department is a division called Inclusion and Organizational Development. Through strategic diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as well as bimonthly justice-oriented trainings for staff, this effort expands the definition of who social justice education in higher education is for. It requires participation from a variety of roles, designating staff from dining services, financial management, human resources, facilities management, contracts and operations, custodial services, and residential education as learners. This expansion of who is providing training and who is considered a learner supports a transition towards diversity and inclusion principles as a basic expectation, rather than a specialty of residential education, and designates all staff as stewards of the institution’s and department’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Not every campus, though, is organized with a clear delineation of who is responsible for providing leadership for social justice education and incorporation for staff in a residence life department. However, it is clear that the functional area of residence life is transitioning away from justifying the existence of social justice training in the first place towards infusing justice-oriented principles into the day-to-day elements of work. This in turn creates a strong baseline of understanding surrounding issues of equity among staff, which residential education has always strived to achieve with students. In Why Aren’t We There Yet? editors Jan Arminio, Vasti Torres, and Raechele L. Pope offer that residence life divisions are addressing “inclusion beyond structural diversity and diversity as a problem, and instead tak[ing] advantage of the benefits of diversity to create pluralistic communities.” In short, the question now is less about why social justice and diversity is important and instead how theoretical justice-oriented principles can be integrated into the ongoing training of often busy, sometimes chaotic, residence life programs.
Infusing justice-oriented principles into training programs, regardless of a student- or staff-centered audience, requires intentional planning and mindful facilitation. Before training begins, the planning team must first identify their grounding principles. For many, that grounding principle is trauma-informed care, because, especially in the continuation and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the people who make up campus communities have endured a collective trauma of shut downs, ballooning work expectations, and social isolation. While everyone experiences and names trauma differently, actualizing trauma-informed practices is a crucial grounding principle, because it recognizes that violence, victimization, and traumatic experiences cannot, and should not be expected to be, checked at the door.
Roger Fallot and Maxine Harris in their book Creating Cultures of Trauma-Informed Care: A Self-Assessment and Planning Protocol identified five principles for integrating trauma-informed practices into educational settings: ensuring safety, establishing trustworthiness, maximizing choice, maximizing collaboration, and prioritizing empowerment. In a practical sense, this means engaging the grounding principles as well as actively listening to the experiences and needs of staff to build a training that is both useful and compassionate.
One of the fundamental jobs of residential education is to create communities that empower a student to live out their identities and stories authentically, especially given today’s realities of unmet basic needs, unchecked privilege, and institutionally entrenched barriers to success.
First, creating a collective learning environment requires an explicit acknowledgement that knowledge is not owned by anyone and that everyone has more to learn. This will allow learners with various levels of familiarity with the session topic to engage in the same space and learn something from the session. Second, facilitators must consider if the training centers whiteness and white comfort. If the core curriculum centers on helping the white majority learn and understand racism, for example, then ways must be found to shift the learning focus so that Black and indigenous people of color (BIPOC) and others on the margin are not harmed. Presenters can and should engage scholars of color to illustrate points and invite learners to share in an authentic manner, rather than expecting participants of color to share their life story, potentially to their own detriment, to underscore the message.
This training must be done with the awareness that neutrality is not possible in learning spaces and that biases inform every aspect of learning situations. Even if everyone in the training space commits to upholding the highest standards of respect, multiple studies have shown that implicit biases often predict how people will behave more accurately than do stated values and conscious thoughts. Being prepared to point out implicit biases in a training space does not excuse the behavior, and facilitators must be prepared to engage with any potential harm caused by a learner’s implicit (or explicit) bias. Further, recent research suggests that in addition to implicit bias training, participants must engage with what professor Barbara Applebaum of Syracuse University calls a “willful resistance to know.” This concept describes those people who hide behind their education in implicit bias to insist that, despite their systemic privilege, they cannot be oppressive because they have learned about their biases. It is not enough to name implicit biases; rather, participants must also be willing to engage authentically with how their biases continue to show up in a workspace, despite having learned about them.
This leads to the fourth grounding principle of naming the elephant (or elephants) in the room. What is happening in the world that might affect how learners enter the training space? What identities and power dynamics are present among the learners in the space? What invisible identities might be present in the space and influence how a learner experiences the training? To this end, the Model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity, created by educators Susan Jones and Marylu McEwen, is helpful because it emphasizes the “salience of particular identities” depending on the environment in which a learner finds themselves. While this model was created with students in mind, it underscores the importance for all learners of feeling heard and respected. If, for example, a white person dominates a conversation, this could cause another learner to feel that their identity as a person of color is made invisible or disrespected in the learning space. At the forefront of these considerations should be the creation of a learning space that explicitly advocates for learners with historically marginalized identities and specific needs related to their learning experience.
While these four grounding principles are not an exhaustive list, they do ask leaders to consider how to maximize empowerment and agency in the learning process, create a collective learning space, and establish trustworthiness by naming racialized and otherwise oppressive group dynamics. The question becomes how to actualize these principles consistently in training practice.
Once justice-oriented grounding principles are established, the priority becomes actualization. A common and effective method of ensuring group buy-in is through community agreements. These agreements are often created within the learning space, but it also is beneficial to enter a training with specific community agreements in mind that are selected specifically to support the anti-racist and justice-oriented training.
One community agreement often found to be understandable, effective, and maintainable is that participants are allowed to speak without interruption. This helps avoid situations where individuals talk too much, speak over others, or do not share airtime sufficiently. Another agreement is that everyone can name group dynamics around issues of power and the expectation that everyone will call out microaggressions if they occur. This can be modeled with prompting phrases such as “I’m noticing . . .” or “there’s a lot of interrupting happening, and it’s happening along gender lines. I want us all to work to become more aware of that and change it.” This takes a step beyond the first example of naming an interruption and connects it explicitly to how people with certain identities may show up in a space and how they may experience a training differently than their peers.
A third effective community agreement is that learners speak from their own experiences. Integrating personal experience can serve as a tool for liberatory education, as well as a technique to ground learning in real-life experiences with oppression. It also helps remove barriers surrounding social justice education related to constantly evolving language. Professionals are sometimes chastised for not knowing the more accepted social justice terms to address an experience or a problem; speaking from personal experience allows them to be included in the conversation in an authentic and accessible way.
Beyond the structure and content of social justice training practices, it is also important to consider the design of physical and virtual learning environments. Universal design is the concept that all learners have different abilities and needs in order to be able to access the learning space equitably. The universal in universal design does not suggest one best way to accomplish learning goals for everyone, but rather the importance of flexible approaches in teaching and learning. In practice, this means being sure to consider if the physical space and room set-up is accessible to all. Physical space accessibility means evaluating factors such as door widths, table heights, extension cords across the floor, and access to elevators that may restrict individuals with mobility aids. It also includes considering the activities that make up the training session. It’s important to remember that not all disabilities are visible, and asking individuals to get up and move (such as walking to corners of the room to indicate answers to questions) may have disparate impacts based on ability.
There are other physical considerations. Restrooms need to be available and accessible to all, and, when outlining their locations, be sure to include the location of gender-inclusive restrooms so trans or gender-nonconforming people do not have to out themselves to find them. During the training, be sure to utilize closed captioning and a microphone with adjustable heights (or a lapel microphone) and make presentations and supplemental information accessible via a screen reader. To make sure that physical needs are documented and considered, it is useful to engage with participants prior to the start of training.
Creating justice-oriented training requires knowing what makes up the audience. To proactively consider any specific needs, it is critical to think about the demographics of participants as well as what visible and invisible identities may be present. With this in mind, when selecting session facilitators, it is important to acknowledge positional power dynamics, both as they relate to the demographics of the audience and to the content they are being asked to facilitate. Specifically, positional power does not equal identity-based power. Two staff members could hold the same job title or role in a department, but, based on their identities such as race or gender, one facilitator could have more identity-based power than another. This is not to say that people with privileged identities cannot be facilitators. Rather, selecting facilitators is not an identity-neutral process. For example, in a department-wide training about the cycle of socialization, it would be beneficial if one facilitator could share her experience from the perspective of a woman of color while another did so as a white trans staff member. Being mindful about selecting facilitators, while also engaging with them proactively about the vulnerability required to discuss marginalized identities at work, enables participants to see the complexities of multiple identities and speak to different experiences in the same work environment.
No matter the training topic, how information is shared is directly tied to how well learners will absorb, critically assess, and implement the material. Utilizing multiple learning strategies can accelerate learning, especially when they account for diverse verbal, visual, and kinesthetic learning styles. It also helps ensure that participants can digest information by offering multiple modalities for learning such as case studies, lectures, assignments that can be read in advance, small group discussions, roundtable discussions, role play, art, and social media. Further, learning is more accessible when it is not just dense articles, slide presentations, and citations. While this is one strategy for teaching, the more that participation and diverse ways of knowing are integrated, the more likely it is that participants will be engaged. Including time for reflection, informal conversations, and emotional processing can also help learners engage with the material at a level of deeper learning. Be mindful of experiences and identities and consider if affinity spaces could be appropriate and helpful in minimizing harm when discussing sensitive topics. Choosing to engage some or all of these strategies can demonstrate a community of care and empathy, even if the topics that are being taught are not explicitly connected to social justice or diversity.
Utilizing multiple educational strategies also includes creating and utilizing inclusive content. Regardless of the training topic, there are a few key principles to inclusive content. First, use shared language that is digestible. Define any terms that will be commonly used so that language is not a barrier to participants fully engaging in the training. Consider staff that are new to the department and the use of localized acronyms and jargon. Also, recognize that there may be staff from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds who are not familiar with references that may be used to illustrate content. Finally, if the training involves conceptual frameworks, utilize research and theories that represent a diverse array of communities. This will help ensure that the presentation is grounded in research that represents the diversity of the world, the campus’s student community, and the individuals on staff. To be more inclusive, departments should prioritize self-assessment. Facilitators and participants alike should be encouraged to know and re-know their identities and biases, including how they relate to others through the lens of power, privilege, and oppression.
Reflecting on identities and biases is the first step towards discussing power and privilege disparities, as they appear in both the workplace and a learning environment. This is important because a critical piece of social justice practices is critically analyzing power; the issue must be named before it can be addressed. A key term in moving the conversation beyond personal reflection towards actualizing change is intersectionality. Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to specifically highlight the invisible oppression experienced by Black women, the term is defined as a “lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.”
This framework acknowledges that student and staff experiences at work and in training sessions are impacted by the totality of their identities. Particularly for staff in leadership positions and facilitators, it is critical to name disparate levels of power and privilege in a space and how this may impact those with visible and invisible identities. For example, trainings in student life divisions and housing departments often touch on how students’ basic needs are met. A facilitator who is white will have identity-based power in that space, especially when discussing generational wealth gaps that disproportionately impact BIPOC people. Simultaneously, if that facilitator also identifies as transgender, they have less identity-based power but could have a closer connection to the topic of housing insecurity, as homelessness rates for transgender and gender-nonconforming people are exponentially higher compared to those for cisgender people. Naming power dynamics as they relate to identities requires a level of vulnerability from facilitators, but leaning into this work aligns with the previously identified grounding principles.
Moving beyond naming power and privilege disparities, facilitators or members of the leadership team should provide opportunities for practical application of social justice to staff members’ work beyond the training setting. Staff should be allowed to challenge unjust systems without punishment and encouraged to reimagine and implement alternatives. For example, at UC Davis, staff are actively working to reimagine what fee structures within our housing contracts could look like through an anti-racist lens. This work is ongoing, but it involves embracing the established guiding principles (called the principles of community at UC Davis) and exploring how those may apply to everything from levying fees such as lockout charges to the room and apartment rates.
Training is a highly visible opportunity to demonstrate a departmental commitment to social justice. Guiding principles, universal design for inclusion, multiple learning modalities, and naming power and privilege disparities are strategies that create inclusive learning environments. Beyond training, there are countless opportunities to examine and shift hiring practices, decision-making, processes, and performance management systems. As higher education strives to become a place where historically marginalized students are affirmed, the related practices must evolve. Through deliberate and justice-oriented leadership, we can create transformative and sustainable change within student housing.
Em Camden Doolittle is a basic needs advocate for student housing and dining services at the University of California Davis. Leota Wilson is an assistant director of residential education there. They both also presented on this topic as part of the 2021 ACUHO-I Conference & Expo.
