Gendered Futures in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives for Change

8. Advocacy Education: Teaching, Research, and Difference in Higher Education

8 Advocacy Education Teaching, Research, and Difference in Higher Education Becky Ropers-Huilman and Denise Taliaferro Recently, scholars and practitioners have generated urgent questions about how institutions of higher learning should encompass the diversity of participants and paradigms in academic settings.These questions have focused broadly on desired changes in institutional culture or climate (Chang, 2002; Hurtado, Milem, Clayton -Pederson, & Allen, 1998; Kezar & Eckel, 2002; Kolodny, 1996; Minnich, O’Barr, & Rosenfeld, 1988), the implications of reconfiguring disciplinary content and boundaries (Gumport & Snydman, 2002; Stanton & Stewart, 1995), and relationships among and between students, faculty, and administration (De La Luz Reyes & Halcon, 1988; Kraemer, 1997; Turner, Myers, & Creswell, 1997). Most scholarship insists, albeit in varying ways, that those in higher education need to embrace diversity and make teaching and learning environments both welcoming and educationally useful for all participants. Although this literature has encompassed a broad range of perspectives, we continue to seek literature that both provides and questions strategies and rationales for those of us who are interested in serving as advocates to persons who have typically been marginalized as “diverse others” in our day-to-day academic environments. In this chapter, we want to add to literature on higher education theory and practice related to diversity by exploring the complexities of what we are calling “advocacy education.” As faculty members in the field of education, we find that our research, teaching, and advocacy are inextricably linked. When we set out to do any of the three, the other two are implicated in various ways. As such, we use the term “advocacy education” throughout this chapter to convey that understanding. Our purpose in this work is to explore the ways scholars ’ positions in the academy influence their abilities to effectively act as 151 advocates, teachers, and researchers in multicultural environments. We do this through close examination of our participation in a seminar entitled “Women of Color in College” on a predominantly White southern campus. SETTING THE STAGE During the fall semester of 1996, Becky Ropers-Huilman and Stefanie Costner , a graduate student who had been assigned to work with Becky, initiated the development of a group to focus on women of color in college. As scholars of higher education and as persons who were interested in making educational environments more accepting of all participants, they decided that this project would mesh well with their convictions. Becky and Stefanie held an initial organizational meeting a few months before they intended to officially start meeting and decided to hold future discussions in the African American Cultural Center on campus. During the spring semester of 1997, those who chose to participate met about every other week for approximately three hours in the afternoon. This group originally consisted of Becky (a White assistant professor in Higher Education Leadership), ten graduate women (one Asian American and nine African American) in English, Higher Education Leadership, and Curriculum and Instruction, and two African American undergraduate women in English and General Sciences. Our ages spanned three decades, with our youngest member only eighteen years old. Denise Taliaferro was one of the graduate students who elected to participate. We chose to ground our analysis of these experiences using various assumptions embedded in feminist, womanist, critical, and poststructural approaches to knowledge. These assumptions contradict and overlap each other in various ways, yet are united by their assertions that knowledge is partial, political , and related to the identities of its constructors and interpreters. Further assumptions assert the value of: 1. finding differences and sites of conflict rather than themes that can be generalized (Tierney, 1994); 2. telling previously silenced stories (Collins, 1991; Lorde, 1984; Reinharz , 1992); 3. recognizing that there is more than one way to measure the usefulness of research (Fine, 1994; Lather, 1986, 1991, 1994; Reinharz, 1992; Wolf, 1992); 4. suggesting that there is always more than one story that can be told of a given situation (Pagano, 1991; Tierney, 1994; Wolf, 1992). Guided by these approaches, this section presents the context of the research, examines the theoretical (dis)junctures that informed this work, and considers 152 ADVOCACY EDUCATION the ways our positions influenced the questions that we were able to address and the understandings we were able to create. Using this particular combination of theoretical tenets, we chose not to write this chapter as if we were telling one story. Although we agree on the importance of advocacy education, we often see and thus negotiate the emergent tensions differently...