Re-making our Purpose: Students As Colleagues and Centering Student Leaders
By Frankie Chaidez, Nayle Garces, Karly Weiss, Maggie Baker, & Jake Kurczek
As we sat in our online reading group meeting for the third time over winter break, about an hour into this particular meeting and 5 hours of previous discussion behind us, a silence bloomed and blanketed our discussion. It wasn’t your classic online meeting awkwardness, it wasn’t that we were lost discussing the issues at hand, instead it was a shared understanding that we just opened a box and that we couldn’t ever stuff the goods back inside. It was the moment of realizing that we had set off the first movements for liberation, that we were confronting, challenging and rejecting the status quo in order to better address student inclusion, belonging and success.
Our reading group included 3 students from the Civic Leaders program at Loras College and co-directors and NetVUE’s 2022 Big Read, Patrick Reyes’s (2021) The Purpose Gap. The book provides inspiration and practical guidance to create new stories of vocational reflection and conditions of thriving for those students in higher education most historically marginalized, flipping the literature on leadership traditionally focused on stories of heroic individuals creating their success by their own efforts, while failing to recognize structural obstacles faced by those in marginalized communities.
Drawing on lessons from The Purpose Gap and informed by la paperson’s (2017) understanding that A Third University is Possible, student leaders in the Civic Leaders program are at the center of a movement to reimagine higher education by working within and against the institutional structures we inherit. Loras College, the second oldest Catholic institution west of the Mississippi River was founded in 1839 to educate priests and continues to grapple with its own history and the role the institution played in colonizing the Upper Midwest of the United States.
Since the Civic Leaders program's inception in 2017 it has been philosophically grounded in decolonizing higher education systems by working to reduce historical exclusion and provide structural change through disruption in traditional models of student programming. The design and execution of the program has consistently viewed students as colleagues and community partners as co-designers and co-educators. Here we present a student-led evolutionary process of the programming within Year 2 of the program. In the traditional banking model of education Freire notes that “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.” As Reyes (2021) notes, “The purpose of education is not to gather and regurgitate facts and white history. Education’s purpose is to heal and find freedom.”
Equity and Empathy Training for Community-Based Service Learning Projects
When building the Civic Leaders program, we partnered with City of Dubuque Human Rights Department staff to conceptualize the second year of the program focused on equity. Professionals from the city worked with student leaders Mallory Gardiner (1st cohort) for the first two years, and Nayle Garces (3rd cohort) and Frankie Chaidez (4th cohort) for the last two years. Nayle and Frankie, through knowledge gained in the reading group focused on Reyes’ concept of the purpose gap, challenged program directors to reimagine/re-build an experience they emphasized should be run entirely by students of color. Their efforts have resulted in them overseeing a student leadership team for Year 2 of the program, working behind the scenes to create onboarding and training materials so that future students will work as a team to lead their peers in the program.
Evolution of this piece of the program provides a road map for a practice to decolonizing higher education systems, grounded in inclusive practices, critical pedagogies and critical service-learning that beckon us to look towards structural change that puts historically marginalized students at the center of institutional training and education. Nayle drew from the Purpose Gap, we are stronger as a community. Reyes describes that we are all constellations, not just individual stars, but a bunch of individual stars that are connected to one another. This revolutionary approach that Nayle and peers started, already has had a positive impact on culture change and individual development within the program, as seen in a recent reflection from one of the emerging leaders:
“It made me think about what exactly I can do to help people in my community. I’m not an influencer or a person in authority so sometimes I feel it is hard to be an influence, but this week opened some eyes for me. The first thing that opened my eyes was that in my community I can have an influence on how people can view black people. In my community, I know I can make an influence by showing people who black people really are. I can do this by one leading. I can be an educator on the Year 2 leadership committee and help them lead the way in influencing people on the way to truly becoming equal and diverse. My biggest problem with doing this is that I am scared that I won’t lead right. I’m also scared that nobody will listen.”
Nayle’s response to the last two sentences was to emphasize the importance of this evolution in our work, pointing to OUR work in community as constellations. This view is strengthened by her identity as a Catholic woman of color. She sees her duty as a person to help those achieve their purpose and calling in life because it is not fair for others to suffer for the institutionalized racism, sexism, etc. that has continuously been prevailing in our society. We need each other to have a better understanding and acknowledge that people are not being treated equally and have the privilege to benefit from the system. Those who benefit from the system need to be aware that they are the leading force in making change for those who cannot.
The training consists of 8 hours of education on equity, empathy and civic engagement that prepares students to work on projects focused on equity in support of the city’s strategic plan. Student leaders administer a train-the-trainer model; younger students become content experts in various portions of the training to lead educational and experiential activities. Other leaders become liaisons for the project and lead the project as the main conduit between community partners and program partners. Finally, trainers then become coordinators who assess the training and adapt it to include new modules and information.
Critical Pedagogy and Students as Colleagues
In Freire’s (1970) view, the classroom should provide a space where the many students who have felt (and been) marginalized can feel empowered and view themselves as owners of knowledge who are free to question what is taught, rather than as recipients and regurgitators of whatever “official knowledge” is presented to them. Teaching and learning in this perspective does not view the instructor as the sole holder of knowledge. Instead learning should involve investigation, dialogue and critical reflection, and the content and activities should emphasize relevance and applicability, with an ultimate goal of liberating students to think of themselves as independent and critical thinkers.
A critical pedagogical approach to learning in the program thus challenges where knowledge flows from and what knowledge is prioritized or viewed as valuable. Similarly, rather than pit students against each other, mirroring colonial hierarchies in the classroom, students work to have an equal opportunity to participate and to help all students achieve a viable level of mastery. With students as colleagues, the role of teachers and advisors is not to control and provide information to students, but to mentor, advise, tutor, coach and be fellow learners - to truly be students’ partners in their educational journey.
Drawing from the work of Battistoni and Longo (2011), asserting as democratic-minded practitioners of civic engagement, we work to ensure students are put at the center of efforts. Further, as the program is focused on civic engagement there is critical reflection on how service-learning takes place. Following Mitchell (2008), the projects and collaborations within the program focus less on the college institutional experience and student experience to instead center social justice, developing authentic relationships, redistributing power and changing social orientation.
Critical pedagogy teaching approaches address the needs of students with their own backgrounds, learning styles, and abilities. These strategies contribute to an inclusive learning environment, in which students feel equally valued. So, how can we shape our learning environments to affirm a student’s presence and their right to speak without privileging certain shared responses? In other words how can we, as hooks (1994) asks, “construct a pedagogy that critically intervenes before one group attempts to silence another?”. Further, also from hooks (1994), “how can professors and students who want to share personal experiences in the classroom do so without promoting essentialist standpoints that exclude?”
This leads us to ask in what ways can we establish new learning environments that promote student-directed dialogue/direction, even when it digresses from traditional plans or assessment categories. Many professors/staff center themselves, cultivating cult-like following. Becoming a central figure to their students’ development, they over demand, under explain perhaps at seemingly random (or specifically biased) times. Both take emphasis from the students and places it on the faculty/staff.
As the student leaders have noted, learning from each other provides deeper learning and reflection. Frankie noted that while learning more about how to be equitable, she also learned how to be a better leader for her peers. When teaching about equity, it’s important to know that everyone comes from a different background, so equity might look different to someone else than it does to me. But by talking to those who have experienced a lack of equity, we can relate and gain a better understanding of what it truly means to be equitable.
Through these critical pedagogical and service-learning approaches, reading groups delving into Reyes’ examination of vocation and the idea of a purpose gap that exists for students of marginalized backgrounds were formed and funded by a NetVUE grant, one for staff and faculty and a second for co-directors and student leaders within Civic Leaders. For the students, the reading group model served as a pedagogical tool to champion the idea of the more democratized instructor role and allowed all of us to co-create knowledge with each other and to ground our future work together.
The Future
Structural change, institutional change and disrupting millennia of colonizing tendencies take time, effort and is bound to meet pushback. How will institutions react to innovations and view these decolonizing disruptions? As students work to rupture how student programming takes place, will there be commitments to decolonizing practices within other programs at our institution and can change be sustained in a way that is institutionalized rather than centered around revolutionary students? While Reyes’ The Purpose Gap and la paperson’s A Third University is Possible have served as initial calls to action and inspiration for this evolutionary approach to student development and leadership, Myisha Cherry’s The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle, is serving further inspiration and was featured in a summer reading group for student leaders and emerging leaders, honing the implementation of the work going forward. As Cherry (2021) states while outlining the book,
“In this book I argue that a particular type of anger, what I call Lordean rage, has an important role to play in anti-racist struggle. Taking it’s name … It tends toward metabolization and aims for change. It is informed by an inclusive and liberating perspective… It is not an ideal type of anger. Rather, it is often experienced by the racially oppressed and their allies.”
Or as Karly reflected, this book has also motivated her to do something new in the future, to use her own purpose to advocate for others to find and define their own. She’s not sure how this will look in whatever career she ends up in, but even if it is just sharing this book or spreading this message, she intends to continue to advocate for closing the purpose gap.
References
Battistoni, R. M., & Longo, N. V. (2011). Putting students at the center of civic engagement. To serve a larger purpose: Engagement for democracy and the transformation of higher education, 199-216.
Cherry, M.V. (2021). The case for rage: Why anger is essential to anti-racist struggle. New York: Oxford University Press.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. London: Routledge.
La paperson. (2017). A Third University is Possible. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Mitchell, T. D. (2008). Traditional vs. critical service-learning: Engaging the literature to differentiate two models. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 14(2), 50-65.
Reyes, P. (2021). The Purpose Gap. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
**Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jake Kurczek, Department of Psychology, 1450 Alta Vista St., Dubuque, IA 52001
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As a proud Latina woman, Frankie Chaidez strives to enforce the importance of opportunity for all those in her community. Raised in the Chicago suburbs and born into a blue-collar household, she has created a deep understanding of the constant injustice that occurs for people of color. Frankie’s aspiration of pursuing a career in criminal justice has led to amazing opportunities of research where she has been able to gain knowledge on the ethnographic disparities that occur beyond her college campus, more importantly within the justice system. With the help and support of colleagues, she encourages those within a student-led program to share their experiences of diversity and inclusion. In this group’s work towards a more equitable world Frankie continues to thrive in her leadership in hopes of leaving a lasting impact on the future student leaders that she works with.
Chicago native and aspiring civil rights attorney, Nayle Garces is a women of color raised by immigrant parents who have always instilled in her the beauty of speaking up when injustices are occurring. She is captivated by diversity and learning about people’s stories through facilitating training for students of color and being a leader in Latinx organizations on her college campus. Nayle understands that her upbringing has prepared, challenged, but also motivates her to fight for the legal rights of the marginalized as she pursues a career in law. Her mentors, through her college career, have been a huge part of Nayle’s story because they have reminded her of the power her voice possesses. Nayle hopes that students with similar backgrounds wanting to get a higher education realize that they are not alone and to always use their voice to seek opportunities.
Introduced to the topic early on, Karly Weiss, a junior at Loras College pursuing degrees in English-Creative Writing and Politics, continues to explore her own vocational calling while working to understand the varied understandings and experiences of purpose in surrounding students, communities, and people. Encouragement to find where the world's greatest needs meet her own deepest desires was emphasized early and often throughout her Catholic education. This exploration of the world’s needs and her own desires have led her to engage in many opportunities on and off campus including Moot Court Team, Waste Minimization Intern for the City of Dubuque, Vocation Grant Intern at Loras, AmeriCorps Intern, book clubs, writer for the school newspaper and more.
Building programs with students, community partners and faculty to contribute to civic learning and social change has been the professional path Maggie Baker has been so grateful to be on since 1998. She is a cis-gender white woman who grew up in Flint and Okemos, Michigan and feels most at home in the northern states and Upper Midwest after big snowstorms or fall days looking over a lake or river lined by bright fall colors. She has embraced and celebrated opportunities to practice and grow in the field of community engagement with guidance and wisdom from generous community partner representatives. Maggie considers her greatest teachers and colleagues to be the student leaders she has worked with to collaboratively build two programs at two different institutions for students by students who are committed to creating opportunities for their peers to contribute to making the world a more just and equitable place.
Raised in rural Wisconsin by parents who worked with juveniles either deemed at risk in education (mom), or finding a halfway house back to societal re-integration (dad), Jake Kurczek learned and worked to engage social justice and change. Now as a professor and co-director of the Civic Leaders Program at Loras College, Jake, a cis-gendered white male, works with students to engage the injustices and inequities in their communities. In collaboration with the City of Dubuque Department for Equity and Human Rights he works to support Loras College’s Civic Action Plan and City of Dubuque Comprehensive Plan. One framework mobilizes expertise in various areas for community-based research, striving to democratize the process of stakeholder input which has reformed city fine and fee processes, decreasing inequities in the city. Currently, this framework is identifying assets and hidden pathways to help citizens obtain and use social services and social benefit programs.
Institutional Context: Founded in 1839, Loras College is Iowa’s first institution of higher learning and the seventh oldest Catholic college or university in the United States. Loras College is a Catholic, diocesan college explicitly oriented to promote service of both church and world through encouraging all members of the community in development of their diverse professional, social, and religious roles. Located in Iowa’s Key City, Dubuque, the college draws primarily traditionally college-aged students from the tri-state area of Iowa, southwest Wisconsin and northwest Illinois meaning that we fulfill our diocesan role by educating the local regional population who then primarily settle within this region. Inspired by the Catholic intellectual tradition, Loras, as a Catholic liberal arts college works to create a community of responsible contributors with multiple and diverse opportunities for experiences in high impact practices like community engagement.
Snapshot Institutional Profile* (for comparative purposes as part of the broader project described below):
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This entry is part of a Public Writing Project, Higher Education for the World We Need, co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Initial reflections in that writing project will be posted here, on the blog of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). The Collaborative is a multi-institutional community of practice, network, and movement hosted in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. The Collaborative advances ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.
Join us for the next Collaborative Summit, Collaboration for a Better World: Global Learning, Hope, and Justice, from November 8-10, 2024, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA.