Ariel Collatz:
So the part of it that I think is freeing is recognizing that you are a separate individual apart from that system and that you get to make your own choices about how you behave, what you think, how you act and that, you know, as a somatic experience, then you get to have your own bodily experience and sensations that are separate from that status quo, that machine, those oppressive systems, however you wanna think of it, whatever you wanna name the roles. And that’s the part that’s freeing is that you get to be that individual body on your own.

Keith Edwards:
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Today, we’re talking about academic advising. I’m joined by three leaders who are here to discuss the basics of academic advising, as well as explore equity in academic advising. We have some really innovative thinkers and leaders. I’m so excited to learn from each of you. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com. We’re launching our first ever listener survey. Please take a moment to share with us what you like and what you’re looking for in the podcast. At the end of this month, February, 2022, we’ll draw three names and send you a Student Affairs NOW mug,

Keith Edwards:
just like this one. You can scan the QR code or click on the image on our social media or on our website, or go to tiny.cc/SANowsurvey this episode is brought to you by Stylus, visit styluspub.com and use promo code SANow for 30% off and free shipping, this episode is also sponsored by Vector Solutions, formerly EverFi, the trusted partner for 2000 and more colleges and universities. Vector Solutions is the standard of care for student safety, wellbeing and inclusion. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns. Are he, him, his I’m a speaker consultant and coach. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. I’m broadcasting from Minneapolis, Minnesota at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to our conversation. I’m so grateful for this three of you for joining us today, let’s begin with some introductions and CJ, we’re gonna start with you.

CJ Venable:
Hello. So I’m CJ Venable. My pronouns. Are they them theirs. And I am the training and professional development specialist for university academic advising at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. I’m joining you from Lincoln, Nebraska on lands, stolen from the peoples. My whole professional career has been in academic advising. And also my scholarly work has focused on aims of academic advising the role of critical whiteness studies in higher education as well as queer and trans people in higher education. So happy to be here.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah, we’re so happy to have you CJ. Thanks for being here. And Ariel, tell us a little bit about you.

Ariel Collatz:
My name’s Ariel Collatz. I use she/her pronouns and I’m the undergraduate programs supervise for the arts group advising center at the University of California Davis campus. That campus sits on the Patwin homelands. And I’m currently in Sacramento, California, which is on homelands. And I am originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota where you’re located and the work that I do is focused on both leadership and academic advising, and I also have the opportunity to work one on one with students. So I’m responsible for training develop visioning you know, guiding students, doing everything from, you know, that first look at the university when they’re thinking about coming there to congratulating them as they’re walking out the door in graduation. Right now my research is focusing on the emotional components of doing social justice work and, and what we’re doing on the inside as we’re navigating the changes that we wanna see in the world on the outside.

Keith Edwards:
Awesome. Well, that could be a whole episode on its own. Maybe we’ll have to do that down the road. Thank you for being here and, and Drew, you’re kind of responsible for organizing this. You suggested both CJ and Ariel, so thank you for the great recommendations. I’m so excited for the conversation. Tell us a little bit more about you.

Drew Puroway:
My name is Drew Puroway. I use he/him pronouns and I work at the University of St. Thomas I’m across the river from Keith in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the ancestral homelands. And I made the leap from Bre life to primary role advising in 2009. And it was, it was good timing because my capacity to do things late at night that required, you know, a lot of presence and thought was diminishing as I approached my thirties and my family was growing. So I traded a duty phone for a crying infant. And yeah, it was fortunate to find a role as a primary role advisor at at San St. Thomas had had that for eight years. And it was great to be kind of closer to the academic life of students in the university. And for the last five years, I’ve had an amazing job leading a team of 10 other primary role academic advisors and on the scholarly side I study professional social theory and philosophy of, and in advising and ethics, how advisors approach ethics

Keith Edwards:
and you’re teaching a class right now. Is that right? Do you wanna mention that real quick?

Drew Puroway:
Oh, it’s just wrapping up. I taught a class, this J term called, his life and pedagogy, and it was a wonderful experience.

Keith Edwards:
Awesome. That’s awesome. Well, you can hear from these introductions a little bit about where we’re gonna go here, but let’s begin with a little bit of basics on academic advising. Well, we’re talking about academic advising as a functional role in higher education and student affairs. What all does that include and Drew? I think you’re gonna kick us off here.

Drew Puroway:
Okay. So I I think this is surprisingly of a more contested and complicated, at least to me than you might have guessed. But I’ll talk, I’ll talk for a minute, like conceptually and then sort of get more towards the task-oriented practice based things. So Terry Coon from 2008 in our big old handbook of academic advising used this definition sort of in an effort to broadly capture what academic advising is in the situations, in which an institutional representative gives insights or direction to a college student about an academic social or personal matter, the nature of this, or might be to inform, suggest counsel, discipline, coach, mentor, or even teach. So everything, everything. Yes. So she goes on to, to sort of write about how advising, this very broad definition goes all the way to Harvard in 1630s.

Drew Puroway:
And it, it’s obviously vague. So you can then start to think about like positionality I’m an advisor, right? Like but this can look all sorts of different ways at different types of institutions. And you know, depending on the mission, the type of institution, the struck sure of the institution, the curriculum. So there’s this off quoted line from west Hadley that’s academic advising is the only structured service on campus in which all students have the opportunity to develop an ongoing one-to-one relationship with a concerned member of the college community. And this may or may not be true and on all sorts of factors, right? So another like often quoted description of what effective advising is, is from a colleague Mark Lowey who wrote that the excellent advisor plays a role with respect to a student’s entire curriculum that is analogous to the role that the excellent teacher plays with respect to the content of a single course.

Drew Puroway:
So Mark’s writing about the logic of the curriculum and approaching advising is teaching . So the philosophy and theory that informs an approach of which there are many approaches and this leads into particular practices. So under the like practical part here, so the practices are then employed within encounters with students and often centering around discussions of discerning a major, sometimes it’s related to a career or vocation on the other side of that. And other times it’s helping the students break break apart that connection that, that X major leads to X career and living happily ever after, or the opposite. Right and it can also be something about academic policy and its interpretation in a particular situation. I ran into somebody in the the just outside our office suite and explained the retake policy it can be rendering assistance in a course in, in course selection and registration.

Drew Puroway:
And it can be discussions of academic difficulty. It can be creating long, you know, course plans. It can be answering really trivial questions like does this psychology course count for my general education requirement? It can be talking through issues and helping support students because of the universe that happens around their academics which you know, academics should be challenging under the best of circumstances. So you layer in any of those life things and, and it gets very complicated. So at the center of all that’s these, you know, a relationship and these are sometimes short one off encounters, and sometimes they’re relationships that last more than four years you know, with, with undergrads. And it, it’s a series of what I think of as moments of of beauty and chaos of beautiful and chaotic moment where a student sits across from you.

Drew Puroway:
And you say something like, what brings you in today? Or what do you want to talk about today? And the next thing that comes out might be super trivial. Like, can you help me switch into an earlier English section or it might be something like my professor just said, some super racist stuff, and I don’t know what to do, or I haven’t been to class in two weeks and I feel totally lost. So the relationship then is mediated in, in and around all sorts of things within your institution and within ourselves as, as bringing what we, we do to those relationships. So and then many advisors also support faculty in their roles, both as faculty advisors and in dealing with struggling students. You know, they’ll, they’ll consult with professional advisors sometimes.

Keith Edwards:
Great. Well, I’m really taken by this notion of the idea that that academic advisor are kind of responsible for the overall curriculum, just like a professor’s of advisor is responsible for an individualized course. I’ve never thought about it that way. That really makes sense. And I’m sort of embarrassed to admit that I’d never thought about that way, and I love how you’ve broken down some of the components from choosing a major program to getting registered for classes, to navigating policies, to really building a relationship and supporting students and faculty CJ, what would you add or build on to what drew has sort of put the foundation here for us?

CJ Venable:
Yeah, I, I think that Drew’s answer was certainly very comprehensive. I think that one thing that has certainly come recently is sort of what drew ended on this quite of, you know, supporting struggling students, particularly as we have entered this sort of student success era, that advisors have really been the primary institutional agents charged with connecting with students who may be in difficulty or are in difficulty. So as we see the rise of tools like predictive analytics to try and identify students earlier, who may be having challenges academically and persisting, it often falls to advisors to be the ones who proactively outreach to students who engage in a more case management type of relationship with students, rather than just once a or twice a semester kind of meeting relationship with students. So there’s been an intensification around what advisors are expected to do beyond some of those pieces of, you know, course scheduling that that are often what students immediately associate with their academic advisor. Yeah,

Keith Edwards:
Well, and then the, the dark side was sort of being called on to help with all of the student success. Is that then isn’t there sometimes blame. Why is the student failing out? What, what happened? What did their academic advisor do on, does that happen too?

CJ Venable:
Yes, indeed.

Keith Edwards:
You’re nodding your head in agreement.

CJ Venable:
Yes. Yeah. There there’s a lot of stuff around that that hasn’t fully been examined by the field because we’ve sort of moved into this place where of course it’s an expectation that advisors are contributing to this retention oriented mission. But that, that wasn’t a conscious decision made on the part of advisors that is generally an institutional mandate. It’s saying, you know, we don’t have the money to hire new staff. So this is an additional role that you get to take on now. And if you really love students, you’ll, you know, be calling them at all hours and trying to reach out to them multiple times and adding this on top of your existing caseload. So there’s a lot to be said about that, but is just beginning to enter the conversation.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. And an academic advisor can’t correct in a 20 to 30 minute meeting, all sorts of institutional culture and societal issues and student mental health and academic challenges and pipeline issues. Although I’m sure you all try your best, but we need some community responsibility. Ariel, what would you like to add to how we’re beginning to define academic advising here?

Ariel Collatz:
Yeah. So the thing that, you know, really strucks me about what Drew said is it’s this sort of way that academic advisors weave through the entire institution. It’s like, there’s no part of the institution that an academic advisor doesn’t touch and needs to be able to connect the student to any resource, anything that they need. You know, obviously with the focus of their you know, curriculum and the academics but that ability to get the student to move throughout the entire institution. And then, as CJ mentioned, you know, the extra expectation that academic advisors have the capacity within their eight hour day to then help support those you know, students who are struggling and folks may or may not have the training to do that. They may or may not be getting professional development support from their institutions to do that.

Ariel Collatz:
And there may not be like clear guidelines within the institution of you know, the number of students that somebody’s able to you know, have in their caseload and what the expectation is for a particular caseload. . I know in some institutions there are guidelines about the number of students in a given advisor’s caseload. I know in some institutions there are wildly different caseload numbers between academic advisors. So it’s sort of like if you’re in this group or this major, or this program, you have a lot more support than if you’re in this other group and it’s not necessarily based on the amount of need a particular student has. It’s just sort of randomly the way that funds have been allocated in an institution . So I don’t know that institutions are necessarily savvy about getting funds to the places where students need them. You know, we’ve got better data tools, but I don’t know that we’re using them the best that we can at our institutions right now.

Keith Edwards:
Well, and I would think that a lot of these funds are sort of retroactively after the fact ad hoc added on not added on a, as things go rather than saying, let’s really look at all of this together. I really appreciate that foundation. I’m, I’m kind of really feeling the, the really great and awesome breadth of the role of an academic advisor. The flip side of that is kind of the overwhelming pressure to know all the things, fix, all the things, solve, all the things, tend to all the things repair all of the things that comes along with this. I, I wanna move us on to a couple different models. Ariel and I were talking before we hit recorded about sharing an undergraduate institution. And at least when I was there, we overlapped a little bit were finding out Hamlin University had a model where faculty who taught a first year summit, were your academic advisor until you declared a major, then you moved to another faculty member in your major who is then your academic advisor.

Keith Edwards:
And I love that model. It made so much sense to me. I had great connections with those faculty. They were really allowed someone to be connected to me in lots of other ways. But then I moved beyond that and started seeing models of professional advisors where that was their primary function, doing this with a lot more professional development time. And I really saw the benefits of that model. And some campuses have a bit of both, right. Some, some over here and some over there. So help us understand some of the considerations for these different models. What’s how, kind of the rationale, the upsides and downsides and Ariel let’s, let’s lead off with you.

Ariel Collatz:
Yeah. So, you know, there’s lots of institutions that have a mix of different models, right? So one is a heavy weight on the professional academic advisor model. So that’s someone whose primary job is to advise students and at a lot of institutions, those folks also have other duties along with that. They have administrative responsibilities that support academic department things that need to be done. So that may include scheduling classes. That’s often a thing that academic advisors will do or other things that have to do with students, registration and enrollment as well. So that’s the like primary advisor model. A lot of institutions have primary advisors, and then they’ll also have level of faculty advising . So for those folks, they would generally go to the primary advisor to get like their registration hold taken care of, but then they would get like mentoring or some sort of specialized academic advising from their faculty advisor.

Ariel Collatz:
And then there’s other institutions where they have just a faculty advisor. Who’s a person who takes care of their, all of their advising responsibilities. you know, for like the larger public R1 institutions, that’s where you’re gonna see more of those specialized professional academic advisors and those smaller, private liberal arts colleges where you’re gonna have more of those just faculty advisors. You know, I think that the interesting question about this is, you know, culture obviously of the institution, you know, what is the field that the campus is looking for to have students experience as part of their advising is one of those consideration? Another thing that I think is really interesting to think about is the structure that the campus has, you know, like what the campus says we explicitly wanna do, and then the kinds of activities that the campus incentivizes you know, particularly around faculty advising.

Ariel Collatz:
So faculty in campuses where they have a really high priority for doing research and faculty are also expected to have advising responsibilities, how are faculty encouraged and compensated for those advising responsibilities? You know, let’s say faculty get a course release to do their advising, but then a high priority is put on research and their compensated and encouraged to do that. Research our faculty, tempted to take that course release and spend that time doing their research or doing advising if there’s no way that there’s accountability for that advising or, you know, if it’s sort of like teaching and then service is down year, but research is really held up in high esteem. So, and same thing with professional advisors, like, what is the campus incentivizing? How are they prioritizing the work that folks need to do? And then like, what are the results that they’re getting from the incentives that they’re, actually putting into place, not just the structure that this they say they want to

Keith Edwards:
Use. Yeah. Awesome. CJ, what would you add about these different models?

CJ Venable:
Well, so this also dovetails nicely with Ariel’s earlier comment about sort of the haphazard way that students are gonna experience advising based on distribution of resources. There are many large institutions that are highly, you know, sort of decentralized that may use multiple of those models on the same campus. So a student in one college might experience exclusively faculty advising, and a student in a different major might exclusively experience professionalized advising with an assigned advisor. So there’s those pieces about the student experience, but then we’ve also seen the ways that sort of new and creative ways of adding things to advisors plates can take the form of roles that are split between advising and recruitment responsibilities. We see many campuses have moved to expect advisors to be able to also do career development work. We’ve seen in some cases, advisors who have departmental responsibilities, like being the internship coordinator for a department.

CJ Venable:
And so campuses I think are trying to explore ways in a climate where resources only seem to decline. So to be able to sort of pick up the slack as they’re, they’re not able to continue having individual people for doing all of these roles. And it’s not a hundred percent clear that there are considerations about what that does to the quality of advising that students receive because if advisors are, are also attending evening and weekend recruiting events, you know, how, what is it like for them when they’re actually on campus trying to see students, if they’re responsible for some of these other outside departmental responsibilities, you know, what does that do? So there are all of these pieces that are really shaping what advising is like for students that make it very different, not only campus to campus, but even within the same campus.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah, I’m really hearing the, one of the themes that we hear across all of our episodes and podcasts is just being asked to do more with less, more, with less, more with less. And I think that’s our really generous, not a hundred percent clearer CJ. So thank you for that. Drew, what would you add here about these different models?

Drew Puroway:
Well yeah, so there’s this idea that we, we get creative and in advising, so on my team, I’ve got a, an advisor who’s primary, you know, primary role advisor, but is one of our school certifying officials with the VAs and focuses on that. So there’s, there’s these different focuses too, that, that folkie that come into to the, the populations that students, that advisors work with. So a couple of my team members are nearly exclusively focused on international students, another advisor who is focused on a particular population of of students who have transitioned from a two year program and we have within our institution and, and supporting students there. So that, that yeah, there’s, that’s completely different than when I started. And everybody was a generalist academic counselor in our, our department. And then even other things besides like the work with students you know, there’s the, the proliferation of technology around advising has caused us to bring somebody into our team. That’s willing to sort of be the champion of, of those things. And that’s you know, that’s a something that’s, that’s certainly been a you know, we’re talking about current events in, in advising. I think that’s a there’s, there’s just a lot of increased rate of change in, in that.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah, I’m curious just kind of quickly, you’re talking about some of these changes going from generalist advisors to more specialized focus on programs or student populations to things like that is that had a trend that, that we see kind of moving in that direction, or is it more like I see in housing and residence life where I see equal amounts taking housing and residence life and separating them as I see merging housing in residence, life doesn’t seem to be a trend either way, but just seems constant. Is there a trend toward more fewer generalist advisors and more specialized or not? Is it just kind of moving each way? And is there a trend toward more faculty advisors versus more professionalized advisors or not quick thoughts?

CJ Venable:
I think in general, there’s certainly a move away from faculty advisors. I think that in general, the capacity to ask staff members to take on new duties to serve increasingly large caseloads is something that you, you can’t do as readily with faculty members. And so I think that we’ve seen a shift also as part of this sort of student success movement of if we have somebody who’s dedicated to doing this work with students, we also have greater control over the quality of advising that students receive. So I think that’s certainly a trend, not as sure about changing models.

Keith Edwards:
Okay, great. Well, thank you. Well as we heard in your introductions, all three of you are really focused in really different ways around equity in academic advising. And our audience is super interested in these conversations about different models, philosophies, mindsets, approaches that can bring equity more centered in our work. And they’re also interested in really practical, pragmatic tools and approaches and strategies. So love to hear from all three of you about what you see emerging either in your scholarship or in your practice what you see as trends and some recommendations you might make so that we can better center equity in academic advising work and in the institution’s work and better serve all of our students. CJ, we’re gonna let you kick us off on this one.

CJ Venable:
Sure. So two things that I see from my work and as trends within advising, certainly there is a move towards a stronger emphasis on the idea of advisors being advocates for students saying that advisors should be expected to look for patterns when they’re meeting with students that indicate that there are systemic barriers at the institution and advocating for those things to change receptivity to advisors doing that is certainly highly varied. But I think that in terms of a lot of folks are seeing that, that that is something that advisors really need to be able to effectively serve students. In terms of my own work, I’ve really made a, a turn towards trying to think with decolonial and settler colonial thinkers around the role of higher education and kind of questioning a lot of the closely held beliefs about what the purpose and aims of advising should be.

CJ Venable:
If we understand theta institution as fundamentally a force for settler colonial expansion. And so I think that as we continue on there’s going to be an increasing look at how some of these more critical theories can come to bear on really the purpose of advising, whereas in the past, many of those purposes were sort of unquestioned that of course we are agents of the institution. Of course, we are struggling to balance allegiances to both students and to our employer but really questioning how much loyalty we should have when we see the level to which institutions can be oppressive, not only towards students, but faculty and staff communities and the ways that those pieces are really raising a lot of ethical questions about our capacity to sustain the institution when sustaining the institution ultimately means sustaining oppression in that way.

Keith Edwards:
How might that purpose shift you talked about some of the ways that maybe we wanna shift away from, if we do make that shift in purpose, what might we be shifting toward?

CJ Venable:
So I have been thinking a lot about a teeny tiny book called a Third University is Possible. And in that book the author advocates for those who work within the settler colonial university to rethink their role and look for opportunities to press back against oppressive structures in ways that your employer may not approve of. And so really starting to think about, you know, what are the things that we can do when no one is watching? What are the things that we can not ask permission to and make use of the privilege that we have as people who work for the institution for myself and my work in critical whiteness studies, I think a lot about what level of risk I can take as a white person who talks a lot about race that other folks may be at an increased risk compared to me.

CJ Venable:
So really thinking about, you know, I don’t particularly want to get fired. But I also know that there are things that I can be doing decisions that are in my purview that I can make around. I mean, in my role, making decisions about the kinds of professional development opportunities that I provide and making a conscious choice to center equity and social justice, as part of all of those opportunities on our campus is something that may or may not align a hundred percent with the desires of the institution, but is a way that I can try and equip other people to do that kind of advocacy for students. And so you certainly get into some challenging territory at times, but it’s really about forcing us to come to grips with what it means to continue to sustain the status quo in ways that we don’t like to think about, because it would require us to acknowledge just how oppressive our Institute can be towards students, faculty, staff, communities, and on

Keith Edwards:
And on. Yeah. I love this the third university, a great reverence. We’ll make sure we get that in the show notes and also shifting away from across the systems and how, how do we create more liberatory structures and more liberatory experiences for, for students, right. Both organizationally, structurally, but also on that individual level as well, the both and there, Ariel, what are some of the equity centered approaches and practices that, that you’re doing that you’re seeing that you’re, you’re thinking about?

Ariel Collatz:
Yeah. So I’m glad that I get to go after CJ to talk about this. You know, that, that status quo and some of the ways that we maintain that are through like policing ourselves and something that happens you know, when something comes up, there’s like an oppressive structure and we ourselves will contribute to the maintenance of that. And sometimes it’s as simple as to, to the maintenance of that keeps ourselves comfortable. and to break with the maintenance of that is to be uncomfortable. And so what can we do to break with the status quo and manage the discomfort that we experience as we decouple ourselves from that system? So, but that’s an emotional experience that we have, right. We might feel angry or we might feel sad. We might feel frustrated. Yeah. Like any of those emotions could come up as we experience that process.

Ariel Collatz:
And so that’s what I’m really interested in is that emotional uncoupling of the status. I mean, it’s literally something that we feel in our bodies. So it’s like we’ve taken the status quo and we’ve embodied it. It’s physically become part of us. So how can we take that status quo, take it outside of our bodies so that we can stop maintaining those structures. So that’s what I’ve really become interested in, because I think that until we can start doing that work, it’s really hard to do that equity work, cuz we’re like fighting with ourselves internally about, do I make myself uncomfortable in this situation? Do I maintain my comfort in this situation? But once we can figure out what we need to do in a, our emotional space to move forward and deal with that discomfort, then I think that that equity work just becomes that much easier for us. Yeah.

Keith Edwards:
So you’re really positioning the emotions and the, the somatic experiences of the systems and structures in our bodies as a big obstacle, as long as I’m caught up in my emotions and the tension in my shoulders, then I’m focused there rather than on the change I want to make, or this student needs very, something very different for me than I planned on in our 20 minutes. Yeah. And it’s a really critical thing to acknowledge and recognize and work through so that the folks can be on, on the change or the service or the student. Right.

Ariel Collatz:
Yeah. And that’s difficult work to ask folks to do, but it’s like freeing work to be able to do that to be in it or in some cases to get to the other side of it where you can say, I’m gonna say the thing in the meeting, that’s gonna disrupt the status quo and I don’t care, or I can handle the sensations in my body that are uncomfortable, that are gonna come or, or

Keith Edwards:
I’m excited about it. I’m excited about the juice and the energy and, and the thing. Could you just say just a little bit more about you, you talked about how it is hard work and some people don’t think it’s be part of their work life to explore emotions. But you said it’s freeing. Could you say just a little bit more or, or maybe an example about that part?

Ariel Collatz:
Yeah. So the part of it that I think is freeing is recognizing that you are a separate individual apart from that system and that you get to make your own choices about how you behave, what you think, how you act and that, you know, as a somatic experience, then you get to have your own bodily experience and sensations that are separate from that status quo, that machine, those oppressive systems, however you wanna think of it, whatever you wanna name the roles. And that’s the part that’s freeing is that you get to be that individual body on your own.

Keith Edwards:
Beautiful. Drew I’m sorry. You have to go after both of those. I

Drew Puroway:
Know I was like, not sure if it was appropriate to use the reaction buttons in the fancy podcast, but like I wanted to do all the hearts here.

Keith Edwards:
What would you add drew?

Drew Puroway:
Well, I think, I mean, it’s so easy with, with what advising is to get like, it, it goes to power and control real fast, like yeah. Some Dean or higher has thrown a bunch of money at advising to be the panacea of retention. And so it’s like,

Keith Edwards:
Well, and lemme just interject. I was thinking about that as CJ was talking about the shift from faculty as a staff, sort of in seated, say this, I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but it seems like faculty might be more resistant where staff are easier to control. Cause they don’t have tenure. They don’t have some of these protections. They don’t have a faculty Senate and we can just make ’em do it. And if they don’t like it, we have control. Right. Yeah.

Drew Puroway:
Yeah. So I think in thinking about like what’s really maybe radical or is you know, acts of disobedience. I talked to an advisor who was really frustrated that some Dean was like approving something from some privileged squeaky wheel student. And so this advisor went out and was like, I’m gonna dig in the data and I’m gonna find every single other student in this situation that could get the same exception to the policy that didn’t have the like privilege to like line or, you know, whatever engage like. And I thought, you know, wow, that is like, and it just a great example of I guess it’s, you know, throwing a wrench into the system. It doesn’t necessarily change the system, but it, it frames your practice, you know, looking for those things. Kind of taking things in another direction, like you know, if your, if your institution’s mission is something to do with like the common good and you’re, you’re sort of shaping students perception of their own education you, you can, you can again take that 40,000 foot view of the curriculum and you have, you have some ability within those Interac to point students towards critical consciousness.

Drew Puroway:
So when you talk about the curriculum, you have to deal with the unjust implications of that. So if you’re, and are students thinking about their education is making them sort of like more or less free and is it, is, is it giving you a more critical comprehension of what freedom even means? And that’s something we so desperately, I think need in our society right now is of so it’s, it’s not, yeah, you’re not gonna start some internal revolution in a 30 minute an advising conversation, but it’s that hope for the, the future I’m in my approach to advising like I’m, I have lots of hope and, and little expectation of of that, but we also can serve like, and this is a, a within the system sort of approach.

Drew Puroway:
It’s not the revolution, but it’s like we are interpreters of the institution for, for those who do not have the experiences coming in. And again, without an eye towards that, this whole relationship is a lot of power and control and, and that’s very much, I think how it, it gets framed in the minds of up like administrators. And unfortunately it not framed in the minds of like the, the awareness isn’t always there. That, that being that interpreter, you have to really be rooted with your students. And I think in a lot of those conversations, it’s, it’s really hard for a room full of people with fancy degrees to get past like a deficit way of thinking about students.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. Well, and you, I wanna go back to the, the really great example you gave. I mean the definition of privilege is advantage is the, it, some people get that other people don’t and advantages, and some people get that everyone should get, but they don’t. And so sort of, you know, I, I can’t override the Dean in giving this exemption, but what if everybody who needed it got it too, right. That could be real, really disrupting things. And I’m glad you chimed in there about a deficit model approach moving away from that to what are this, what do, what do we, what does everyone have to offer? What are they bringing? What are they already knowing? What’s the lived experience? What’s the richness of that? We got a little bit before I wanna move to our, our closing questions. So CJ, Ariel anything, the two of you want to add here before we move to, to wrapping up,

Ariel Collatz:
I’ll just, I’ll add a couple of specific things about centering equity and academic advising. You know, I think it’s really important to have conversations with students about identity, about who they are. And this is not, not just mean, you know, having a conversation with students of color or trans students, or you know, students that don’t hold privilege. But having a conversation about identity with students who do hold privilege and then you know, identifying ways to create equitable environments for students. So, you know, like what are, what do folks need, you know, so like, are the bathrooms in your building available and accessible to all students? Is the seating in your building available and accessible to all students? You know, just really simple like that, who, who is my student population and what it, what is it that they need and how can I advocate for that in really simple ways so that they can physically come to my office and sit with me because if they can’t do like the number one thing of getting to you, then you’re not as an advisor gonna be able to get to the next step of having that deep and helpful conversation with them.

Keith Edwards:
And how do they see themselves in the space and the art and the examples and the people, and, and feel seen in, in their experience there. Yeah. Awesome. CJ, you want to add anything here?

CJ Venable:
Yeah. I had two thoughts, first of all, I just have to say the first time that I heard Drew pose the question of how is your education making you less free as a way to engaged in advising with students was truly a transformative moment for me and is something that I continue to be haunted by in thinking about that power relationship between advisors and students. That’s part of the reason and my concerns about some of the technological advances around things like early alerts and predictive analytics have really come to the fore because those are all fundamentally premised off of a deficet way of thinking about students. You can’t develop some sort of scoring model without ranking students. You can’t develop a sort of a, a color coded rating system or a numerical rating system without considering, you know, some of those inputs that are entirely out of students control, like what high school that they went to, what their race is.

CJ Venable:
And starting from that place of saying, you know, all of the students of color are gonna get a lower rating on this predictive analytics tool, because we know that there are these associations between who actually graduates from this institution and those demographic categories, making those decisions based on those kinds of tools is an expression of power. And so really starting to critically analyze how we use those two tools why we use those tools engaging in really thoughtful discussions about what are the implications of that way of sort of sorting and managing students as coming from this position of based on score. That means we know something about you. And so I’m going to act in a particular way, because I know it’s best for you based on this tool, that’s supposedly telling me something. It is really something that has become very commonplace and has not really been critically examined yet.

CJ Venable:
And so I think that there are lots more conversations coming I can say I’m in a couple of different writing projects that are starting to explore that now, but really to say that some of those power dynamics are still really underexplored in advising because for many advisors, the idea that, you know, students come to me because I have expert knowledge and the students should follow the advice that I give them. So this fundamentally unequal power, our dynamic is just the way things are for so many advisors. And so really starting to grapple with what it would look like to have a less hierarchical kind of relationship with students, I think is something that it’s a conversation I’m really excited for. I think that Drew’s scholarship around a critical pedagogy kind of approach to advising is a great start. And I think there’s much more work to be done in thinking about what, what that could look like. Yeah,

Keith Edwards:
Well wow. We’ve covered ground from the emotional experiences in our bodies of oppressive systems to troubling predictive analytics and everyone, every thing in between. So thank you all so much. We’re we are running out of time. This podcast is called student affairs now, and we always like to end with asking folks, what are you thinking troubling or pondering now might be something you’re thinking about in your scholarship or in your practice, or maybe just something that’s coming up for you as we move through this conversation. So we’ll give each of you a chance to, to share what’s what’s with you now. And if you also wanna share where folks can connect with you, that would be great and welcome as well. So Drew, what are you, what are you troubling now?

Drew Puroway:
Well I CJ’s comment is actually something that I do think about. And I had mentioned before, like the proliferation of technology and, and surveillance technology in some ways, you know, that a CRM helped my team better manage the follow up we do on academic alerts and it, the emotional connection to the students, it became a game of digital whackamole , you know, or just it, and, and so that’s an interesting little piece of what someone I talked to once called like cyborg sociology or something like that, and but I also, like, I, I am just troubled by, oh, we have this system. And, but then there was a group of students they’re like, well, they’re getting Ds and Fs. Why, why were there no alerts? And it’s like, because the students are great and they’re like doing the things. It’s just that, like the support services in this particular situation are not culturally responsive. Like so it, it’s a, it’s a big investment in something that I think in some ways like just can fundamentally change the work. And it’s, it’s real easy, I think for advisors to fall in the trap of like if you’re, if you’re biggest fanciest tool as a degree evaluation, you recenter so many things around that you know, a hundred thousand dollars worth of app that your institution may have gotten. And that’s yeah.

Keith Edwards:
So sounds like we’re getting closer to just pushing widgets out the door and away from the humanity of it. Yeah, yeah. Ariel what’s with you now.

Ariel Collatz:
So what’s troubling me now is this push to always be doing more with less, and I’m wondering where the room for our humanity is when we’re always doing more with less, because that seems to be the one thing as some of this conversation has brought up keeps getting pushed away.

Keith Edwards:
Great. How about you, CJ?

CJ Venable:
Well, you you’ve heard a bit of some of the things I’m thinking about one other direction. My thinking is going is I recently started reading Pleasure Activism by Adrian Marie Brown. And so I’m, I’m really starting to think about if we know that certainly across higher education and student affairs, it’s the same in advising that there’s significant departure from the field within the first five years. Trying to start thinking about, you know, how does pleasure factor into people’s thinking about their work and what are the ways that we’ve been disciplined into finding particular things pleasurable? So this, like, of course you have to be intrinsically motivated by your love for students. And that is the primary, like satisfaction you receive from your work is the messaging that a lot of people receive. And then when you get into a role and find that that may not sustain you at every moment I think that there’s certainly more work to be done. I’m trying to do some more thinking around, you know, what does it look like to center pleasure in our work, in advising and across higher ed student affairs?

Keith Edwards:
I love that. I love that a great author I’m familiar with, haven’t read that one, but I think it’s a, you’re making me think about new things and some new possibilities there. So, well, thanks to all three of you for joining us. This has been terrific and all that you brought and all that you shared thanks for your leadership and your contributions today. We also want to thank our sponsors for today’s episodes, Stylus and Vector Solutions. Stylus is proud to be a sponsor of the podcast. You can browse their student affairs, diversity and professional development titles at styluspub.com. You can, you always use the promo code SANow for 30% off off all books, plus free shipping. You can find the Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter @styluspub and Vector Solutions. How will your institution rise to reach today’s socially conscious generation? These students report commitments to safety, wellbeing, and inclusion are as important as academic rigor when selecting a college it’s time to reimagine the work of student affairs as an investment, not an expense. For over 20 years Vector Solutions, which now includes the campus prevention work.

Keith Edwards:
Formally EverFi has been the partner of choice for 2000 and more colleges and universities and national organizations with nine efficacy studies behind their courses. You can trust and have full confidence. They’re using the standard of care for student safety, wellbeing and inclusion transform the future of your institution and the community serve. Learn more at vectorsolutions.com/studentaffairsnow, and as always a huge shout out to Natalie Ambrosey, the production assistant behind the podcast who makes us all look and sound good. And don’t forget to complete our listener survey in the month of February to when your chance at a mug, just like this. You can find that on our social media, on our web page, in our newsletter and at tiny.cc/SANowsurvey I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks again to the fabulous guest today and to everyone who’s watching and listening, make it a great week. Thanks all.

https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/a-third-university-is-possible

https://www.akpress.org/pleasure-activism.html 

https://meridian.allenpress.com/nacada-journal/article/36/2/4/81285/Critical-Advising-A-Freirian-Inspired-Approach