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Niceness In Student Affairs Report

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Getting away from niceness in student affairs: Critically analyzing student affairs culture around difficult dialogues
Introduction
Current national student affairs organizations, like NASPA and ACPA, place a significant emphasis on diversity, social justice and inclusion. According to the ACPA and NASPA national core competencies (2010) student affairs administrators should have “the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to create learning environments that foster equitable participation of all groups while seeking to address and acknowledge issues of oppression, privilege, and power (ACPA, 2010)”. Patton, (January 2018, personal communication) argues the field of Student Affairs avoids difficult dialogues and furthermore avoids conversations …show more content…

Why I think this matters partly stems from my lens and experience of supervising 11 student leaders in higher education and trying to engage in difficult conversations with my colleagues. Currently, I work at a large Pac-12 public university in a Career Center of 25 employees and 11 student leaders. Through my experiences, I found conversations around power and privilege were difficult to have for both myself, my students, and my colleagues. In short, people in my office did not know how to have difficult dialogues without feeling like they were going to upset someone or get hurt themselves. In the field of higher education, we have national standards for social justice competencies and institutional wide strategic plans on cultural competencies. However, conversations around racism, inclusion and its impact, are challenging for Student Affairs professionals to have in the field of higher education. Many Student Affairs administrators are challenged by having difficult conversations, and in return, the ramifications can be damaging towards other students and …show more content…

According to Brene Brown (2017), since the 1970’s and compared to 30%, 70% of people have reported that they do not engage in conversations with people who think differently to them and are less likely to be vulnerable during conversations that may challenge their world view (find page number). Like conversations that challenge a person’s world view, difficult dialogues aim to challenging a person’s paradigm (Freire, 1970). While when we hear the term difficult dialogues we oftentimes think of race and racism, however, the term also refers to conversations that are complex, paradoxical, and tension heavy which includes subjects such social constructed identities (race/ethnicity, gender, sex, and sexual orientation), politics, religion (CELT, 2018).
According to Roderick (2008), the goal of difficult dialogues is to help college educators (faculty staff and college administrators) create a campus environment where sensitive topics can be discussed in an “open scholarly inquiry, intellectual rigor, and with respect for different viewpoints” (Roderick, 2008). Furthermore, difficult dialogues help create new and existing educational curriculum which aims to increase knowledge of the religious and cultural complexity and engage students in constructive discussion of conflicting

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