Faculty and Staff Partnering With Student Activists: Unexplored Terrains of Interaction and Development

In this study, we build on two recent works (Gaston-Gayles, Wolf-Wendel; Tuttle, Twombley, and Ward, 2004; Slocum & Rhoads, 2008) that examine faculty and staff work with student activists, but expand the scope to include new questions such as why and how they partner with students, the impact of institutional context, and what role it might play in student development. We use the tempered radical theory to frame the study. The research project involved case study research of five campuses and interviews with 165 grassroots leaders. We believe the main contribution of this study examining faculty/staff and student partnerships for change was being able to identify the everyday, common, and humble ways that these groups work to create change on an ongoing basis that is often missed in literature that focuses on dramatic and radical events of student activism. We also believe that it is through these common and every day experiences that students have the most opportunity for student development because they occur regularly, provide ongoing opportunities to practice activism, and teach students the everyday skills of being a good citizen.