EDAD 568: Philosophy of Student Affairs Revisited

Year 2 / Fall 2021 / Friday, September 3, 2021

DESCRIPTION

For EDAD 568 - students were asked to look back at their "Philosophy of Student Affairs" paper from EDAD 521 and reflect on how their philosophy has changes. This assignment was due on September 3, 2021.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

1. Student will be able to synthesize learnings and reflections from a full year in the program into their existing Philosophy of Student Affairs.

2. Student will be able to create a new Philosophy of Student Affairs that combines the learnings from the prior year.

LEARNING DOMAINS

• Education

• Social Justice & Advocacy

• Personal & Professional Development

REFLECTION

“I believe that the purpose of student affairs is to guide students not only in the journey to the degree, but also in the journey of transformative personal growth. Student affairs professionals must support a student’s holistic personal development – to grow intellectually, emotionally, socially, and politically as citizens of the world. We must utilize a transformational education paradigm to encourage engagement, self-reflection, and critical thinking to help students understand themselves, the world, and their place in the world. These students who are equipped with a deeper consciousness of themselves and the world will create change in their own lives and society.”

This is what I stated in my EDAD 521 Philosophical Reflection Paper on September 28, 2020. Even a year later, I am still committed to this philosophy. However, as I have gone through a full year of the program and learned more about higher education and student affairs, my philosophy has also evolved to be grounded in theory, lived experiences, and social justice.

This past year, I learned about different student development theories and connected them to my lived experiences. For example, in Spring 2021, I learned about Baxter Magolda’s (2001) Theory of Self-Authorship. Baxter Magolda defined self-authorship as “the internal capacity to define one's beliefs, identity, and social relations” (Baxter Magolda, 2008, as cited in Patton et al., 2016, p. 281). Students who have undergone the process of self-authorship can make decisions based on their own internal foundations, values, and belief systems rather than external influences (Patton et al., 2016). When I learned about this theory, it resonated deeply with me. At the start of my own college career, my goal was to go to law school and become a awyer. I thought that would be the way to repay my parents for all their sacrifices and hard work – that was the cultural expectation within my community for what the eldest daughter of a working-class immigrant family was supposed to do. However, as I prepared for law school admissions, I struggled to feel motivated in the admissions process. Then, a faculty mentor who noticed my struggle finally encouraged me to reflect on my values and think about whether I would truly be happy in law school. That moment led to a type of “self-authorship.” After many months of reflection and pondering, I realized that what I wanted to do instead was work with students of color and address inequities in this world. I made the decision to instead go into nonprofits, then higher education to live my life in alignment with my values. When I learned about Baxter Magolda’s theory in class, it felt like there was a theory to finally give me the language to talk about my lived experiences with self-authorship.

Connecting my own lived experiences to different theories helped me realize the importance of grounding our student affairs philosophies in both theories and lived experiences. In my original philosophy, I stated that “we must utilize a transformational education paradigm to encourage engagement, self-reflection, and critical thinking to help students understand themselves, the world, and their place in the world.” Reflecting on the last year and my philosophy, I realize that this statement resembles the process of Baxter Magolda’s self-authorship. I would now revise my philosophy to include that student affairs professionals must “help students through the process of self-authorship – the process of understanding themselves, the world, and their decisions in the world.” I would also incorporate other theories that have resonated with my lived experiences as a student and student affairs professional, such as Rendon’s Validation Theory (1994) and Sanford’s Challenge and Support (1966). Incorporating theories will strengthen my philosophy by grounding it in widely known and well-researched theoretical concepts that help students grow and succeed in college and beyond.

Lastly, in my original philosophy, I stated that “students who are equipped with a deeper consciousness of themselves and the world will create change in their own lives and society.” Since this statement, we went through a full year of a global pandemic that revealed vast social disparities and moments of reckoning with injustice. I believe that it is even more critical than ever that we are helping students make an impact in their own lives and society. In my current role in student affairs, I work with students from low-income, minoritized communities. These students are the ones who feel the daily brunt of social injustices. I have seen the ways how my students have persevered in college during what was an incredibly tough academic year because they saw education as a way to change their lives, their families’ lives, and their communities. This Fall 2021 semester in EDAD 505B, we read Paulo Friere (1970), who sees education as “the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination” (p. 81). Friere’s words struck me deeply – it is more imperative than ever that student affairs professionals think about the impact we make in the lives of our students and their communities. Rooted in Freire’s argument about the potential of education to liberate students from oppressive structures, I continue to feel very strongly that student affairs practitioners should create educational experiences to empower and free our students to make changes in their lives and society for the better. Utilizing transformational educational paradigms to help our students develop holistically and achieve self-authorship will allow them to shape their lives and society to advance justice and equity in our world. Our work as student affairs practitioners should be a “practice of freedom,” and my philosophy continues to incorporate and embody those values.

REFERENCES

Baxter Magolda, M. B. (2001). Making their own way: Narratives for transforming higher education to promote self-development. Stylus.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The Continuum International Publishing Group.

Patton, L.D., Evans, N., Forney, D., & Guido, F., Quaye, S. (2016). Student development in college: Theory, research, and practice (3rd Ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Rendón, L. I. (1994). Validating culturally diverse students: Toward a new model of learning and student development. Innovative Higher Education, 19, 33–51.

Sanford, N. (1966). Self and society. Atherton Press.