MSCHE Pillars of Change
MSCHE Pillars of Change
Episode 10 - Student Researchers
In the 10th episode of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) Pillars of Change Podcast, Davie Gilmour, Chair of the Commission, hosted three students who presented Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) research at the MSCHE 2023 Annual Conference.
Davie was joined by Sahtrese McQueen, an undergraduate student at Pace University (NY), whose research analyzed controversial topics and threats on freedom of student newspapers; Mackenzie Wise, a graduate student at Baruch College of the City University of New York, whose research focused on the struggle of first-generation students and cultural integration; and Vidya Surti an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, whose research examined classroom disability inclusivity.
00:00:16 Davie Gilmour
Welcome to the Pillars of Change Podcast presented by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. My name is Davie Gilmour, and I serve as the chair of the Commission. Thank you for joining me for the Commission's continuing series of podcasts, focusing on topics of diversity, equity and inclusion.
This podcast series spotlights highly effective institutional practices tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion that have made a difference in the lives of our students.
Today we are talking to students from several of our member institutions who presented their research in a poster session at the Commission's 2023 Annual Conference.
95 undergraduate and graduate students from 31 institutions presented posters showcasing their research, which ranged from a variety of topics including microbiology, psychology, and artificial intelligence. But today we are joined by a select students who presented research related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Welcome to all of you. We will begin with each of you introducing yourselves with your name, major and institution.
00:01:32 Sahtrese McQueen
Hello everybody. My name is Sahtrese McQueen. I am a senior in digital journalism at Pace University in New York.
00:01:41 Davie Gilmour
Thank you.
00:01:42 Mackenzie Wise
Hi, my name is Mackenzie Wise. I am currently a graduate student in the second year of my master's program in education, focusing on Higher Education Administration at Baruch College in New York City.
00:01:54 Davie Gilmour
Thank you, Mackenzie.
00:01:56 Vidya Surti
Hi everyone. My name is Vidya Surti. I am a graduating senior studying anthropology, English chemistry, and global health at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
00:02:09 Davie Gilmour
Thank you all for joining me today. I'd like to begin by asking you each to give us a brief description of the research that you presented at the MSHE 2023 annual conference, your research methods, and in particular, why you selected that topic. Let's begin with Mackenzie.
00:02:30 Mackenzie Wise
Thank you. So my research, or the research that I presented at MSCHE in 23, focused on cultural integration for first-generation students, specifically looking at how to best support first-generation students as they make the transition into an environment that may have cultural norms that they're not familiar with. And I specifically used Tara Yosso’s theory of Community Cultural Wealth to analyze some of the assets or cultural norms that first-generation students might have that could support them as they enter the higher education environment and can help them thrive. And the reason I chose this topic was I find the concept of culture in higher education really fascinating. It's intangible, but we all know it can have a significant impact, not just on students, but on other community members such as staff and faculty. And this was my first foray in trying to understand how people who may not be familiar with the cultural norms of higher education institutions can try to adjust. And so that was really what motivated me to look at first-generation students and cultural integration.
00:03:49 Davie Gilmour
Excellent. Vidya.
00:03:51 Vidya Surti
Yeah, so my research was in part due to the Frederick Honors College Chancellor's Undergraduate Teaching Fellowship. So I served as a teaching fellow in this course named “Ailing Bodies, Narratives of Health and Illness.” And this is a course in the French department and is taught by Dr. Kaliane Ung, who is a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh. And so I took this class in fall of 2021 and I was sort of thinking like, how can we make this course a bit more accessible? How can we think about disability in new ways? And so what me and Dr. Kaliane Ung did is we sort of, you know, created this midterm level project in which undergraduates would work in groups or alone on this project that would integrate critical disability studies and digital humanities into projects that would transform the landscape of the French and Francophone research community, and so we sort of led students through this schema of, well, what are your research questions? How do you write an abstract? Taking them through the methodology of research and introducing them through that area of thought and focus. And then we sort of created this scaffolded rubric in which we gave dates and deadlines that were flexible and were able to be moved around and contested in order to, you know, keep students well-being and health at the focal point of this because we found that it was really important to teach accessibility. We really need to, you know, embed it in the systems of the classroom and so, along with like other resources of like librarians and myself and the instructor, students sort of created these very, very interdisciplinary projects that capitalize on their interest, thinking of how disability and digital humanities come together to really empower, you know, students to learn new technologies, but also to make sure that they are autonomous in the classroom, that they're learning at their own pace, that they're keeping their well-being sort of at the focus of their education.
00:06:23 Davie Gilmour
Very good. Excellent. Sahtrese.
00:06:26 Sahtrese McQueen
Hi, so my research was actually more so about my student newspaper at our school. I was able to look through about 50 years’ worth of newspapers over the summer 2023 after I was awarded our Provost’s Student-Faculty Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry Award. And with that I was able to kind of delve deeper into the question of how students tackle dealing with administration while talking about controversial topics. And by controversial topics, I mean things such as, you know, legal matters happening at the school or taboo topics such as gender, sex. You know, things along those lines. It was a very interesting question to ask, and I just personally I thought it was really important that we ask this question of students now because the world of news is changing and I wanted to see how administration had a hand in either influencing how students present that research or present those topics to the world you know, as like their world, their society, and how that reaches brighter when they graduate and when they go into news moving forward. So yeah, I was able to look through those 50 years and just take topics and see how administration kind of either promoted and aided students or kind of stopped them or intervened in newspaper kind of newspaper happenings. So that was just a bit about what I was able to research, what I was able to present. And I just think it's very important, which is how the world of news is changing now.
00:08:11 Davie Gilmour
What surprised you, Sahtrese, in what you've read and learned. What was the one thing that might have stuck out through your research that really surprised you?
00:08:19 Sahtrese McQueen
I think what surprised me most is kind of some of the changes that did happen and the presentation of controversial topics. So one of the interesting things that I found is that while stylistically not as a lot of things changed and a lot of things kind of tracked with what happened, not only in college media but also media outside of college, a lot of the controversial topics that were presented, they were changed in a way where it went from having the perspective of the students to kind of making it more of an educational topic. So instead of talking about this direct thing from the perspective of the writer, say they were talking about immigration in the 90s, it would soon switch over to an educational kind of group activity that was going on on campus that was teaching students about it. And while, that's very good that students are able to have a place to learn in a more informational status. It kind of took the perspective out of the writer or the opinion out of the writer, and I think that's very interesting to see, especially that how that tracks to even how we present news now.
00:09:27 Davie Gilmour
Very good. Vidya, did you find anything really surprising in your research? Something that stood out to you as an unexpected development?
00:09:37 Vidya Surti
Yeah. I think one thing, I guess students were very at first apprehensive of, you know, one of the policies that we implemented was this sort of “ungrading,” like, you don't really get a grade in the class. Like there's no like quizzes. There's no, like, “oh, you got a 90% on this, and this is contributing to 40% of your grade,” like not necessarily the case. And so students actually sort of worried about that because, you know, on their final transcripts, they're like, “oh, there's gonna be a grade, though. This isn't like a like a pass-fail class, right?” And like most of the people, ended up getting A's, but I think there's that like that mounting anxiety and tension of sort of, you know, diverting from the normal like “oh, this is a traditional syllabus. This is a traditional grading schema.” And you know, this is like, “oh, I've done this before. I've worked with this. This is easy.” But when, you know, classrooms sort of like straight from the norm. Some students tend to get anxious, which is very interesting because this is, you know, in fact, sort of trying to help students in order to, you know, protect their well-being and their state of mind.
00:10:55 Davie Gilmour
So interestingly, causing stress that influenced their well-being and state of mind. Mackenzie, did you have any unexpected results or surprises in your work?
00:11:05 Mackenzie Wise
I found this was learning about the experience of first generation students was kind of a steep learning curve for me. I'm not a first-generation student, so something that surprised me was in just learning about how difficult it can be to transition into the higher education environment. It just wasn't something I was really aware of, and learning about the hidden curriculum, that was something that I had never encountered before. Before studying first generation students. And really, the higher education field and that was a surprise for me, just to learn that there is a hidden curriculum, that there are all these habits and practices that we kind of take for granted if you know them or you know, it can be difficult to understand if you're not familiar with them before entering college. So that was that was a big surprise for me.
00:11:56 Davie Gilmour
Very good. I'd like to move on and ask you each how your research could apply to other institutions. So I'll stay with you, Mackenzie. How do you think what you learned could be applied at another college or university?
00:12:09 Mackenzie Wise
So one of the big takeaways I had from my research was learning how first-generation students really rely on their families to act as a support system for them as they're transitioning into college. And this is one of the cultural wealth that Tara Yosso talks about in her theory of community cultural wealth, being able to rely on family and use them as a support system. And something that I think schools can do to really take advantage of that built-in support system is try to involve parents more in their first-generation child experience. And that might mean hosting sort of parent orientation programs for first generation families or publishing newsletters in the native language of the student and their family so that the parents can be more involved and that way when students do turn to their families for support, the parents aren't sort of in the dark about the you know, what's happening within the school, and they can really try to give families support through that.
00:13:10 Davie Gilmour
Very good. Vidya, how about you? How do you think your research can apply to other institutions?
00:13:16 Vidya Surti
Yeah, sort of one of the takeaways that I got from the conference was someone asking me, well, what about smaller size classrooms? What about larger classrooms? So this class was about 50 people. So at the university, that's probably like a mid to small size class. And while there were lots of opportunities for, you know, group work and group instruction, maybe thinking of if class sizes are smaller at certain other universities, I think the work that would be done in those projects would be more individual and you know adapting sort of the grading schema, the scaffolding of the rubric to adapt to only one person having to do this work may be an interesting challenge. If it were in a bigger classroom setting that also might be interesting at a larger, you know, university with more students, that could be, you know, even more of a challenge. How do as an instructor, as a teaching fellow, sort of keep up with all these group projects. What if even students want to do you know, individual projects? How does that change the dynamics of the course when you're interacting with a wide lecture hall of students? It's hard to, you know, do one on ones. It's hard to sort of make sure the class is feeling like they can succeed in, you know, having these conversations about wellness and class autonomy is sort of difficult in these spaces as well. So I guess for that, you know, it would sort of have to be adapted to like maybe there's one and two or two instructors, one that's more, you know, digital humanities focus and one that's more traditional humanities focus. Maybe there's a wide sleuth of teaching fellows at the undergraduate and graduate level you know who specifically do certain things and have specific focus areas to aid student research and so thinking of all these things and applying them to different classroom settings and to different, you know, settings of universities could prove very useful actually, because it is very adaptable. It is very, you know, in a way focused on a specific thing in that you can propagate it to different sorts of like channels, or to change that outcomes for different sorts of needs.
00:15:50 Davie Gilmour
Thank you. Sahtrese, what do you think? How would your work produce something different for a different institution?
00:16:00 Sahtrese McQueen
It's a great question, and I had to really look into that for my research, how students not only within my university, but how students are affected outside of my university when dealing with pushback from their administration. So, I think that this is something that can be applied on a much broader scale. When you ask the question of not only how are we dealing with how administration can have a say in what's going on in newspaper versus another institution. Other institutions’ newspapers, some of them have their own funding, so they have less of a fear of getting into trouble or getting funding pulled or getting repercussions for their postings because they don't rely on the university for that, whereas other universities, mainly their funding, comes from there, so if it does come to a point where it goes to a legal court, they can say because the university is the one funding, they have a right to have a say in what goes on in the newspaper and that leads to a whole bunch of other questions, not only with how students are maneuvering these situations, but how they might even be censoring themselves for that fear of a potential repercussion that would result in either getting their job taken away or that they're placed in the newspaper, or even having funding pulled or going to court and whatnot. So I think that it works so well within other institutions because this is a broad question, not only just for students at one university, but how it affects all student journalists and how that will further affect journalists in the future.
00:17:46 Davie Gilmour
Very good. You know we're here because we're talking about the conversation of diversity and inclusion and your work all focused on some element of that. So how does higher education play a role in enhancing or altering the conversation of diversity and inclusion? And we'll stay with you, Sahtrese, for the first answer.
00:18:06 Sahtrese McQueen
Well, I think that's a really good question because a lot of what is spoken about, at least in the papers itself, that often has an issue with administration, no matter across the board, is conversation about diversity and inclusion. And I know one of the first, topics that I read in the newspaper was students talking about like the amount of students that were coming to my university in the 80s, how there was a lack of like diversity, you know, and how that eventually grew over time. But a lot of the papers later, when they were speaking about what I spoke about earlier with presentation earlier, it was talking about opinions on diversity and inclusion and things such as like affirmative action, how that was controversial at the time. But later it became like an educational, you know, educational point for the people to do without actually putting in their own opinion. And I feel like we need to have these discussions within the paper because it's not only just about what's on campus, but what can be spread across our campus, what could be spread into the wider world outside of just what's in our, what's aside from what's just happening in our in our area.
00:19:26 Davie Gilmour
Good. Mackenzie, how does the role of higher education enhance or alter diversity and inclusion conversation?
00:19:35 Mackenzie Wise
So thinking about how higher education influences diversity and inclusion, I really think that higher education institutions in the US are engines of progress and this is something I've read in, you know, research studies throughout my time in my graduate program about how we view them as like a tool for social mobility. And with that in mind, you know, I really think that we rely upon higher education, or just like the attainment of education as a way to, like, launch citizens into our society to affect change and makes you know, hopefully make social change for the better, to lift all of us up. And though the way that we approach diversity inclusion at the higher education level will inevitably end up affecting the way that these students who graduate go out into the world and affect change in their own careers in their own fields, and so how we teach students to deal with diversity and inclusion efforts now we'll end up having those long term effects as they go out into society, and so I think we can have tremendous influence over how we shape the conversation of diversity and inclusion, what we choose to, how we choose to give support and who we choose to give support to, and that will end up affecting who gets support later on when these students enter into society. And so I think it's really important that, you know, we do this, we try to be as inclusive and supportive and equitable as possible with students.
00:21:08 Davie Gilmour
Very good. Vidya, your thoughts on higher education and how they impact diversity and inclusion?
00:21:16 Vidya Surti
Yeah. So sort of what I was thinking of is these like two spheres, one that's very micro and one that's very macro. And in terms of micro, I'm thinking of what my project sort of served as a template to think about classroom well-being in classroom autonomy at a very local scale, and I feel like that's important because you can replicate it, you can, you know, share syllabi with other professors and other teaching fellows, and you know, sort of discuss results and discuss, you know, what can we do to sort of propagate this change? And there's also, you know, other types of classroom settings really focused on, you know, disability culture, disability literature that I'm also taking that sort of, you know, do the same thing where you know we're reading books from disability scholars. We're all on zoom. We're all feeling accommodated. We have the ability to get extensions, and it's sort of, you know breaking this mold of like oh you have to work until you like basically die from all the stress and all the pressure of you know this like system that you were put into, but in terms of the macro thinking of, you know, who are the vehicles of change in administration? A big example that I have is actually my Honors College, the Frederick Honors College at the University of Pittsburgh, their idea committee. And sort of what they're trying to do, they're trying to get student and staff input to sort of, you know, be this vehicle of change to improve the Honors College’s DEI outcomes, improve accessibility not only in the policies and procedures, but also in the classrooms and the programming, like every step of the way. And so through creating the strategic plan that we're hoping to, you know, release next upcoming year, we've really focused on making this process of, you know, getting feedback very accessible. We've been working on focus groups where we're meeting the students where they are, like conversing with them, getting their input. We've also deployed a survey where we're trying to get, you know, that wide swath of like student and staff input. And we're also doing this retreat them in the summer that is open to the public, so that people can see how decision making works and how we're sort of proceeding with this change. And so with that example, I feel like it's very important that higher education you know continues to do this work because they have a lot of power, they have a lot of stake to make this change. And I think all we need to do is to keep on rolling, to keep on doing what we're doing and to keep in conversation with the right people.
00:24:26 Davie Gilmour
Thank you. Your research that has positioned your results and your situation you've described to us and with some future action. McKenzie, what do you think your research has done to position how people look at first-generation students when they come to Baruch or another institution? Do you think people are after your research? They're looking at first generation students differently.
00:24:53 Mackenzie Wise
I hope so. I think something, something that I learned a lot about while I was performing my research was the idea of deficient thinking or deficient mindset approach to students who are from marginalized backgrounds. Now speaking very generally, students who are first generation tend to come from a more marginal, more marginalized communities, and the approach that we see often with these kinds of students is that they don't have the knowledge or the cultural habits, practices that would help them succeed in the higher education environment and technically that could that is true to a certain extent that they just weren't raised in that particular environment that would allow them to sort of, let's say like, assimilate easily into the higher education environment as it typically is, but something that the community cultural wealth theory argues is that you know, these students might not have the cultural habits that we think of as necessary to succeed in higher education. But that doesn't mean that they don't have other assets or cultural wealth that can help them to succeed, like being able to rely on family, being able to aspire and have dreams in the face of very real or even perceived barriers in the higher education environment. And so my hope is that this research would help shift the mindset a little bit from assuming that these students are inherently lacking to well, maybe they don't have this kind of cultural wealth, but they do have this other kind of cultural wealth. And let's see how we can work with that.
00:26:39 Davie Gilmour
Very good. Sahtrese, how do you think you've positioned people to look at the newspaper in the future?
00:26:46 Sahtrese McQueen
I definitely think it you have to look at, look at it through a lens of, especially now that we're learning a lot of people are learning and studying to be journalists, but a lot of people also use just regular media as their form of news. And I think that this kind of brings forward the conversation of the difference between media coming from the first hand source of somebody who's either experienced it, or journalists who are going and studying and getting sources, it definitely makes you look at things a little a little differently and see where studying this as and going into the world might have differences from somebody who is sharing it based off of their experiences or what's going on around them, and I think that that is like the biggest thing that I've been confronted with, at least in my research, or in the future of my research, to see the actual changes or how it differs between learning from an institution and learning. Sometimes learning where to start and where to stop versus people who haven't learned that way because at the end of the day, journalism is supposed to be for society. It's not supposed to be something that's censored. It's supposed to be for the betterment of giving everybody the knowledge that they need. So if that knowledge is stumped or is pushed back at a learning institutional level, there's definitely going to be a bigger difference between that and a lot of people who are doing it from their first-hand accounts.
00:28:20 Davie Gilmour
Thank you. I'd like to ask each of the three of you to give me a sense of what's next for you now. We've heard about your research. We heard where you are in your academic pursuits, but what is next on the horizon for you as we begin to wrap up our podcast today? So Sahtrese, let's start with you. What's next for you?
00:28:39 Sahtrese McQueen
I think it's a little sad because I'm graduating this year, so there's so much more I could have done, not only with the college I'm at, but there's also two other universities in New York City and in White Plains that also have their own paper and also have their own history. I was only able to study the history of the college I'm at now in in Pleasantville, which is more upstate of the main one in New York City, but I don't want it to end here like I would love to do even more research, not only at my university, but to potentially look at either other universities, or other institutions of how students are dealing with these repercussions and are dealing with these possibilities of potential, you know, with the university pushback. And like, you know, where there's times in the university tries or the institution tries to shut it down. So, I'm very much looking forward to widening that research somehow and making sure that I'm keeping it as something as a topic of conversation to discuss, especially of how important it is for journalism in the future.
00:29:53 Davie Gilmour
Thank you. Vidya, what's next for you?
00:29:56 Vidya Surti
I'm going to answer this in two ways, so in terms of the research, we've actually just sent out a manuscript for publication detailing the methodologies, the outcomes, and future directions of this research. And so that's really exciting to, you know, get to put that work in scholarly conversation, and I think that's going to be really important going forward. In terms of, like, my own future plan to sort of up in the air right now. I hope to stay with the university one more year at the Master’s degree in bioethics and sort of continue to keep doing the work that I'm doing with the Frederick Honors College, continue to sort of do research in pedagogy and disability accessibility in DEI. If I didn't mention this beforehand, I am disabled; I have chronic pain, and so disability advocacy is something that really is at the heart of the work I do. So whatever I end up doing this next year or two, I hope that you know that really shines through and carries through my work.
00:31:04 Davie Gilmour
Thank you, Mackenzie, what's next for you?
00:31:08 Mackenzie Wise
So I will be graduating from my Master’s program next month. I'm sad to have it end because I really enjoyed my time in the program. I also am trying to continue my research in the future, and I'm transitioning focus, still focusing on culture but transitioning now to looking at staff within higher education because I feel like it's an area that we tend to overlook. So I'm really looking forward to continuing my research on that and then in terms of my plans after graduation, I am looking for work. Hopefully staying in the New York City area, and I ideally will continue my education through training and development programs within the higher education field. So that's what I'm hoping to do after.
00:31:56 Davie Gilmour
That's wonderful. I have to tell you that having this conversation with the three of you today is enlightening, encouraging, and reassuring about diversity and inclusion on college campuses, the research that you're doing, and I want to thank you all for such an insightful discussion. To our listeners, I want to thank you for joining us. If you want the Commission to highlight the efforts of your institution in a future podcast, then please visit msche.org/pillarsofchange to submit your suggestions. On behalf of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, I'm Davie Gilmour, saying thank you.