Flexible Fit

Students enter our universities with various characteristics.  Some have had pre-college experiences such as taking Advance Placement high school classes.  Some are first generation students of color.  Others are returning students who commute and also have various family obligations. No matter what students bring with them when they come to school, I believe an environment should be in place that is affirming, not just welcoming.  Welcoming, to me, still means that I am a visitor, that I really don’t belong to the community, but people are going to go out of their way to make me feel comfortable.  Welcoming does not feel permanent to me, but temporary, like when I leave, the people and the place will return to what it was before I came.   

Fit, or the environment in which students enter into, must be flexible and equitable.  Students should be able to enter most universities with a strong sense that the university is going to be a place where their inputs, their identities, will be affirmed, celebrated, validated and accepted.  I say most institutions because I do not want to minimize that there are instances where fit may not be able to be flexible. 

Student finances and the cost of college should be equitable and flexible, but are not.  I have students who leave all the time because of finances.  But what I have learned is that there is always an “and.”  I had a student leave the institution because she couldn’t afford it “and” she had a difficult time transitioning into the university as a woman of color; she felt like she couldn’t be her authentic self.  The conversation of cost is important when thinking about retention, but I will not focus on cost at this time.

Welcoming versus flexible can also be framed as deficit and equitable models for inclusion. Peña, Bensimon, and Colyar (2006) outline the differences between a deficit (welcoming) standpoint and an equitable (flexible) standpoint.  In the deficit frame, it is only the personal characteristics of students that contribute to success and persistence, or failure of students.  This frame colors identities such as Black, first generation, lower ACT scores or high school GPA as deficits that set the students up for not being as successful in college.  The solution for student success is by providing these students with “interventions” that students must take advantage of.

The equitable (flexible) frame puts the responsibility on the campus, including the structures of the university and personnel.  The university is the solution to the problem of student persistence and success.  Universities must begin to look at student retention with an equitable or flexible frame as in order to meet the needs of the changing demographics of students.

Black

Only Child

Educator

Ally

Voter

Tattooed and Pierced

Golden Girl

Student

Female

Tia

This is a social justice tool called 10 Identities.  As the facilitator, I would instruct participants to list the top ten things that make them who they are; how would you identify yourself using only ten words.  Usually, participants will ask, do you mean like race or gender?  And I will say, list ten things that make you, you.  Depending on the individuals, identities or adjectives such as nice, friendly, and smart, along with Queer, Latina, and Jewish will show up on their lists.  This tool is fascinating, because no matter how many times you do it, your list is never the same.  

My 10 identities manifest themselves in various ways at various times depending on who I am with, the cultural context of the people around me, and basically how I feel like “showing up” in that moment.  My tattooed self is not as apparent because of the stigma placed on piercings and tattoos.  Not professional, someone on the fringe, haven’t you outgrown your eyebrow ring yet.  But then people realize that the tattoo behind my ear is the initials of my nephew who passed on his birthday – four months premature.  Persistence and Excellence, tattooed on my wrist, are my mantras for succeeding in my doctoral program.  Psalms 86, Hear me Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy, was my grandmother’s favorite scripture, and right after she passed she came to me and said “you are never alone, for I am always with you.”  That tattoo is just one way that I remember her words.

I am constantly covering.  Covering is sociologist Erving Goffman’s term for how we try to tone down   Kenji Yoshino writes that we cover across four axes:

Appearance, which concerns how an individual physically presents him or herself to the world.  Will my tattoos ever be appropriate for the professional world?  Must I always need to wear long-sleeve shirts and long pants to cover them up?  Can I wear a head wrap or dangling earrings, or all my bracelets and still be taken seriously?  Affiliation concerns how you choose to identify yourself culturally.  Which of my many identities has the most cultural capital?  And why do I have to think strategically about this on a daily basis?  Activism means how much your polarize your identity.  As a person of color, is it alright for me to be proud that Barack Obama is the first Black President of the United States.  Will people think I voted from him just because he is Black? And Association concerns who you choose to associate with.  Can I sit with my colleagues of color in the University Center and not worry that others may think we are planning the revelation on campus?

Unfortunately, I have come to terms with covering.  It is an every day part of my life.  Something that I need to do in order to survive.  It has become second nature for me to hide parts of myself if I don’t feel safe, or don’t know if those parts of my identity will be celebrated, or if I feel I have to explain that part of myself constantly.  How unfair…

If I’m covering on a daily basis in my professional and personal life, then so are my students.  In my work, I aim to create environments where my students cover less often, where they can be wonderfully complex.  Our institutions need to genuinely and authentically embrace these complex selves, and the environments need to be flexible enough to be able to do that.