Inquiry Oasis Season 3: Leslie Gonzales

In today's episode of Inquiry Oasis, Dean Regina Deil-Amen interviews Dr. Leslie Gonzales, Professor and Department Head of the College of Education's Department of Education Policy Studies and Practice in the Center for the Study of Higher Education.

Dr. Gonzales shares about her professional and personal background and the connections to higher education and her research. Dr. Gonzales discusses two studies she has worked on over the past couple years, sharing the findings from one focused on interview panels seeking innovation and how time impacts how those on interview panels see and honor innovation.

She shares with us about concepts of epistemic inclusion, epistemic injustice, and epistemic exclusion.

Three words that describe Dr. Gonzales's work:

• Inclusion -- specifically, increasing inclusion in higher education through her research and teaching service.
• Public good -- specifically, a belief that public institutions have an obligation, responsibility, and privilege to serve the public.
• Possibility -- specifically, higher education is oriented towards broadening possibility, whether it be the possibility of life, circumstances for students, or what knowledge can look like and what research can go.

Other Scholars Mentioned:

Miranda Fricker, DPhil -- Dr. Gonzales highlights Miranda Fricker's work focused on epistemic injustice. To learn more about Miranda Fricker's work, check out her website here.

Dr. Gonzales gives a shout out to a team of graduate students; Brooke Moreno, April Horne, and Karina Rodriguez--and hopes to share the findings from their collaborative work soon.

Reading Recommendation:

Ebony and Ivory by Dr. Craig Steven Wilder

Transcript

Jeffrey Anthony:

Welcome to the Inquiry Oasis, the University of Arizona College of Education's podcast, here in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. We bring you conversations with our esteemed faculty members and staff whose research impacts lives from Southern Arizona to the far reaches of the globe. We explore the transformative power of education in this border town where diverse cultures and ideas converge, weaving a tapestry of innovation with compassion and a sense of wonder. So, join us as we journey through the sands of curiosity, unearthing insights that enrich and inspire. Sit back and relax. As we invite you to dive into the inquiry oasis.

Dean Deil-Amen:

Welcome everyone to this episode of Inquiry Oasis. We are here today with Dr. Leslie Gonzalez. She is a professor in our Department of Education Policy Studies and Practice in the Center for the Study of Higher Education. She's also the department head, and here in our college we do lots of different research. Some of the research we do is actually about Higher education. We have faculty here who study organizational dynamics of post-secondary institutions, including community colleges.

They study student success and they also study faculty. And so, we're here to hear today to hear more about what Dr. Gonzalez does in her research. Welcome Leslie. 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Thanks so much. I'm excited to chat with you.

Dean Deil-Amen: 

So, we usually start off by asking, uh, what are three words that you think represent you and what you are passionate about?

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Thanks so much, Regina, for the question. Let's see three words that describe me and what I am passionate about. I think the first word would be inclusion. All of my work; research, teaching service, um, really is oriented towards increasing inclusion in higher education. I think a second word is commitment to the public good. So public good. I strongly believe that our public institutions have an obligation, a responsibility, a privilege to serve the public, and we can talk about what that means. And possibility, because a lot of the work, um, that we'll talk about today is really oriented towards broadening possibility, whether it's possibility of life, circumstances for students, possibility of what knowledge can look like, possibility of what research can do.

Um, so those are three words that describe, um, me and why I'm passionate about my research. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

Great. Well, I would like to hear more about what you mean by public Good. We're in a time where there are a lot of people questioning the role of colleges and universities, public institutions, what they should be doing, their role in society.

So can you talk a little bit more about why you're passionate about public good and the, the function of, uh, higher education and the public good. 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I'll talk a little bit first about the, my research agenda and, and what I've been studying really for the last 20 years, all in. Um, so I study faculty careers. Um, I study how faculty members in colleges and universities, how they design research, how they share research, um, how they approach research. 

And I study how that research gets valued and evaluated by peers within colleges and universities, but also by the broader public. Um, and in doing this work, I think what's really exciting and how it’s connected to the public good is that when we think about knowledge creation, it's not just knowledge creation, you know, to sit on a shelf.

It's knowledge creation to help the next generation of teachers or business leaders, or scientists, engineers, to think about the world to conceptualize problems. And my research is consistently concerned with making sure that we create sort of the, the broadest or the most inclusive conditions for knowledge production.

And so, the line between studying faculty work and how we do our research and the public good to me is very clear. As public institutions, it's our responsibility to make sure that we are being as inclusive, as creative, as robust in our research work as possible because it shapes the next generation of knowledge, uh, whether directly through the preparation of practitioners, um, through the formation of policy, through what gets, you know, printed in textbooks, so on and so forth.

Dean Deil-Amen:

So that's really meta. I mean, you are a professor doing research on how professors do research. 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Yep. It is meta. Every situation that I'm in, I'm thinking about my research. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

Alright, great. So can you give us an example, a specific example of one or two studies that you've done? 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Yeah, sure. So, I'll talk about two streams of research or two studies that I've recently completed. One study was largely focused on faculty hiring practices, and this study is, is sort of situated under a, a broader umbrella of faculty evaluation work that I do. In this study, uh, a research team that I worked with all other graduate students, we interviewed, uh, 35 faculty members who had recent experience on faculty hiring committees.

We were interested in understanding how committees, how they fostered inclusive environments in hiring practices and policies. What I mean by that is we were interested in understanding if committees started out saying that they wanted to, uh, hire somebody with innovative research or, uh, sort of to, to be interdisciplinary contributors to their department.

How did they maintain that sort of inclusive approach to their hiring throughout their process? So, we interviewed about 35 faculty members from a broad array of disciplines, although it did lean more heavily in the STEM space, and we found that almost to a T, committees started out at least conceptually wanting to invite innovation creativity into their departments.

It's sort of at the height of a new hire, people are very excited about new possibility as the searches, however, go on what we found across our interviewees, and again, we spoke to about 35 faculty members, and I think we had 63 searches in total that they had participated in in the last two years. We saw, or we heard from them how that orientation to innovation and inclusiveness, it really dwindled as the search went on. And there were a number of reasons why it dwindled.

It dwindled because faculty start to think about, “well, if we invite this faculty member with this really innovative or different approach to X topic or X method, that's really great. But will they be able to advise students that we already have in the program? Will they be able to teach these classes in the way that aligns with our curriculum and our established milestones?”

So, there were these like pragmatic barriers that faculty started to think about search committees, started to think about and to say, oh gosh, maybe we just need to essentially look for more of the same. The implication there is that oftentimes. We know that faculty members that are doing really innovative, interdisciplinary, bridging, disciplinary kind of perspectives, these faculty are likely to come from, um, underrepresented, marginalized backgrounds.

It bears out in the literature in a number of ways. So, in the dwindling interest for innovation and creativity, you know, there was sort of this undermining that happened for creating more representative or inclusive faculties. If you think about the demographics. 

So that was one study that we completed, I guess about a year and a half ago. We've published that paper, and a few papers are still coming out from that project. But we learned a lot that was really helpful from that study. Uh, number one, really, um, the importance of working with search committees to think really carefully about the job description from the very get go and how to stick to the job description throughout the search process, and how to maintain an openness to innovation and creativity and the merits of that.

So that's one study, and again, that study on faculty hiring is connected to one of the streams of research that I, that I facilitate, which is all about like faculty evaluation. 

In a more recent study, I've been working with a group of fabulous graduate students here at the University of Arizona and we interviewed 40 doctoral students, um, from across R-1, Research one universities across the United States.

Most of these students have been women of color, so women from racially minoritized backgrounds, and most of them had been from STEM departments. Our question in this study was to understand how are you being supported intellectually, um, in your program? 

Here we're really interested in understanding what are the conditions around supporting the intellectual work of doctoral students? How is that, uh, that support work or maybe the absence of that supportive work fostering, you know, inclusive, uh, conditions for knowledge production? How are we meeting our mandate as public institutions to make sure that the knowledge production in the academy and doctoral education is as robust and inclusive as it can and should be?

Dean Deil-Amen:

I know that you have this concept of epistemic inclusion. Um, can you explain what that concept is and let us know? Is it tied to any of your motivations to become a scholar, a researcher, an academic? Does it relate to any of your life experiences? 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Ah, this is a great question. Um, so epistemic inclusion is a concept that I first wrote about in 2015 when I was writing about sort of the, the value and the contributions of Hispanic serving and minority serving institutions overall.

Oftentimes these places are not recognized as places where scholars or intellectuals are being fostered. And, um, in my work I've been really interested in identifying the places, the spaces, the populations that are sort of erased or marginalized or doubted as knowledge producers or knowledge producing kind of places.

And so, I first wrote about epistemic inclusion and sort of saying Hispanic serving institutions are places where epistemic work, which is knowledge. Epistemic refers to like knowledge or knowledge making and nature of knowledge. HSIs are places where knowledge work happens and we should recognize them as such. We should foster more epistemic inclusion, um, in the field of higher education and just sort of broadly as a public. When we think about where scholars are, intellectuals are being developed. 

The concept comes from a few places. So there is a broader literature, um, on which I lean, um, it's epistemic injustice, and that's from philosophy.

And epistemic injustice is this notion that there are conditions where people and their, um, perspectives are dismissed. Um, because for, for a variety of reasons; genderism, racism, classism, history, privilege, and that comes from Miranda Fricker (DPhil). She's a philosopher and I've leaned on her work for a long time.

Then there's another concept related, um, that's called epistemic exclusion. It's very similar to injustice, but rather than a sort of a conceptual argument, epistemic exclusion actually looks at the acts, the mechanisms that lead to the exclusion of people as knowers. So really looking at it from a mechanistic sort of perspective.

Epistemic inclusion is more, um, what I've been interested in, in thinking about is how do we as academics, as teachers, as learners, as a community, how do we practice epistemic inclusion? How do we get beyond our biases, our, um, sort our taken for granted assumptions about what knowledge looks like, what it sounds like, where it comes from to be inclusive? 

So, I'm much more focused on the inclusive act to, to, to be inclusive of epistemic contributions, knowers or, or places. Is it connected to a life experience? That's a great question. Um, I often share in research talks, or even in some of the papers that I write about, that a lot of my research actually stems from a very pivotal moment when I was, um, a young child. That involved my parents and the K-12 schools. I grew up in a very small farming town called Farwell, Texas, and at that point, this again was in the eighties.

Um, at that point, um, Farwell was very much racially and economically divided. Um, there were, you know, mostly the, um, white kids and their families that owned property that were in sort of what we might call the professional class or, uh, middle, upper middle class. There were, um, there was a large, um, Hispanic, Mexican, um, Latine community.

Many of us in the Latine community, our families were tied to the, um, farming industry there. Um, my family actually ended up there because my dad worked the farms in that area for a long time when he was a child. And then there was a very small, uh, Black community, um, in Farwell. I grew up on the side of town where there wasn't a lot of money.

It was mostly Hispanic. And you know, I think that there are a lot of assumptions about what that means. And so before, um, going into kindergarten or to school, my parents were very clear that I had an educational trajectory ahead of me. And so, although they do not have formal education, my dad at that point was working in the meat packing plant.

My mom was a stay at home parent. They had a very clear sort of vision for me that I was going to go to school, that I was going to do well, and so I spent a lot of time with my mom at the kitchen table, learning how to read my ABCs, my numbers. I went to kindergarten very well prepared, very well prepared. But I clearly remember, um, that when we were going to kindergarten on the first day of school, there was like this sort of confrontation that happened as we were negotiating those sort of, you know, introductory conversation.

And I just remember sort of being really little and kind of looking up and understanding that like something was wrong. And later on, when I was old enough, my parents explained to me that, you know, there was this question from the teachers that, you know, should I be placed in special education? Mind you, they hadn't really done like an assessment.

They were just sort of going on how we looked, what our last name was. Um, the fact that we came from the other side of the tracks, um, literally and figuratively and when I understood what had happened, I was probably, I don't know, maybe third or fourth grade when I learned the story of like what happened.

I knew something had happened, but I didn't really understand because I was a kindergartner. But in third or fourth grade, when my parents finally started to unpack the story because of a very racist event that had happened in my grade, um, at that time they, they shared with me this broader story. I remember feeling like, wow, that was really sad because my mom and my dad had spent a lot of time really nurturing me and really making me think that I was very smart. I felt like I was a very good reader.

I had a lot of like confidence early on because my parents had worked with me so much and um, I was just became very aware and very alive to the fact that in these very important public institutions, there are people that have enormous power and that enormous power can be material, financial, so on and so forth, but could also be cultural and relational.

And in that exchange, my parents were very much dismissed. They were dismissed as like knowers. My mom's work with me, uh, was dismissed and there was this sort of question about whether or not I had talent or potential or capacity. And so, I think that this sort of exchange, although I was very young, I think it really, um, underlines a lot of the questions that I ask still today.

Dean Deil-Amen:

Well, thank you so much for sharing that story. 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Yeah. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

I mean, it's, it's an example of really the hallmark of our college of education, right? That we have scholars here like yourself, philosophers, even right. Researchers who are interested in, in the betterment of our schools, to make sure that the opportunities there for all students, right.

And that talent is recognized and nurtured, and that's part of what our faculty do. 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Mm-hmm. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

Faculty like yourself, both in K 12 spaces, early childhood, as well as higher education. 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Mm-hmm. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

So, in terms of, um, maybe can you talk a little bit about what you think the impact of your research has been in higher education spaces?

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Oh, that's a great question. I would hope, and I think that, that this is maybe at least a little bit accurate, um, is I think that I've helped, um, some people to recognize. That, um, Hispanic serving institutions, minority serving institutions are places where scholars and intellectual work is happening, where it deserves to be supported.

Um, we know that, for example, I'll speak to HSIs because I've studied them quite a bit. We know that HSIs do sort of a huge disproportionate amount of the labor of working with supporting, um, broadening access for our, you know, Latinx first generation, you know, economically vulnerable populations. That work needs to be supported. And I think I've contributed to that conversation through my work with HSIs.

When it comes to the study of faculty careers and faculty evaluation. I think I, I think that the most satisfying thing to me that I've seen where I've had impact is when I get invited to go work with a group of STEM faculty or in fact philosophers.

I've talked with philosophy departments, and I can sort of gently and with historical knowledge because a lot of my work draws from the history of, of higher education, the history of understanding how the disciplines were created, how we started to create these sort of rules around what knowledge looks like or how it should be produced.

When I'm able to sort of, gently and accurately share this history with philosophy colleagues or STEM colleagues, or even folks in other social science areas, um, it's like sort of providing, um, a mirror. Sort of understanding, like, hey, this is who we are. These are sort of the conventions from which we've come. There's pain in there. There's, there's also I think, an opportunity for folks to be like, “oh, it doesn't have to be like this.”

And so, I think working with colleagues and other disciplines and helping them to understand, um, sort of this collective history in the, in the US Academy and how we've come to be, is really helpful. I've had the pleasure of working with so many groups, um, where I just sort of see these light bulbs and there's this understanding around the history of disciplines and the history of us higher education, that is a real opportunity to open up perspectives in the academy. And I think that makes for better inclusive practices, whether we're talking about evaluating people for a manuscript or eval evaluating authors, excuse me, for a manuscript or evaluating someone for a tenure promotion or evaluating someone for a job opportunity.

Dean Deil-Amen:

I'm really enjoying what you're talking about, you know? Because it really is about the type of knowledge we can produce. Right? And when we look through the history of the higher education as producing knowledge, there's a lot of brilliant discoveries. There's a lot of great things happening. And part of your message is the more knowledge sources we include, the better off we'll be.

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Mm-hmm. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

Right? And it's also a way of. Preventing unfairness, right? That that is your source of knowledge, your, your knowledge about the world and what you have to contribute is not dismissed because that's the last thing we want to do, right? The more we can include, the better, right? And so, you know, your research is really aiming for that goal.

What might you say is one of the most surprising results of the research that you've done? 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. Um, so I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier. I alluded to it that when we concluded this study on faculty hiring, we, again, we interviewed about 35 folks. They represented a 63 search committee experiences within the recent years, and again, almost to a T we saw that, whereas committee started out with this hunger for innovation and creativity, which they almost always connected to diversity. 

We, through the interviews, which were very systematic, very intentional, very pointed, we found that committees almost always narrowed their interest in innovation and creativity for, again, for a number of reasons. And initially I think I was, I don't know that I was super surprised, but it, it just sort of hit me once more that you know, our, and I sort of, people sort of generally our desire for change can quickly be, um, undercut by our desire for familiarity and for sameness. 

And I think that we see that play out in a lot of ways in our current society. I think that there, um, academia, like other places in society, there's almost always this undercurrent where there's an assumption that there's only so much room and if we give room to somebody else or if we make room for a different perspective, what does that mean for our perspective or our place or our contribution? 

You see this a lot in STEM especially. You might have STEM faculty who are nurturing one research agenda. They have a brilliant agenda. They bring in a postdoc, and that postdoc is, is encouraged to stay very close to that research agenda. Um, but that sort of almost cuts off, for example, innovations, new directions. And I'm sort of saying this in a generality. I'm not saying this is like a universal in STEM.

This desire for one's own place to hold onto one's own contribution can, um, quickly, if we are not intentional, if we don't have that mirror in front of us, it can quickly sort of undermine, you know, fostering a more inclusive, more representative department or organization, so on and so forth. 

So, you're right, I think that the message, the takeaway message, at least for me is that. Our job as, particularly as faculty that are employed in a public institution, is to ensure that we're creating the most inclusive, the most robust, the most representative sort of knowledge sources. We know that our most vaccine problems require creativity, interdisciplinarity, um, critical thinking from lots of different angles.

I think we also fear a little bit about what that means for, again, our own place, our own position, our own contributions. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

I can truly see the value of this line of thought that your research is producing. You know, because in the, we're trying to be innovative in, at the university, we've, we say that we value innovation, but what you are pointing out is that there are ways that we are actually stifling or undercutting that innovation if we are trying too hard to keep doing what we, we've always done.

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Mm-hmm. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

Right? 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Mm-hmm. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

And there's value in that, but then there's value in obviously innovating and opening up. Perspectives. Right. Opening up new contributions or ways of thinking 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Mm-hmm. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

About issues and, and it's, it's a tricky balance, right? But it's an important one to be self-reflective about, you know, as scholars and as an institution.

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Mm-hmm. We see this a lot to almost to a T There's so many pushes for interdisciplinary. And in the summit, one of the lines of my research has looked at how do faculty that are involved in interdisciplinary projects truly coming from different disciplines, different departments coming together to work on, you know, an issue, how does that play out in terms of their outcomes?

And I haven't looked at this, um, in recent years, but I will say there were a few studies that I've completed a while back, maybe about 10 years ago, where we found that faculty members that were connected to interdisciplinary studies often did not have great outcomes. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

Mm. 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

In craving innovation like interdisciplinarity or, you know, bridging new ideas or really just sort of unsettling how maybe a department has looked at issues, you have to have sort of the simultaneous, the parallel conversation around, okay, and what does that mean for how we're ready to make room for that evaluatively to retain folks, to make them feel welcome, to make them feel seen? And so that we make sure that we're not always questioning folks, um, in a way that makes them feel like that we're skeptical of what they're doing because they're doing things a little bit differently. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

Exactly. I can see that. All right. Is there anything else you want to say about the research you've done, the impact and your perspective on, on the research you do? 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

I don't have any grand remarks to close, but I just want to thank you all for this time and opportunity to share about the work. Um, hopefully we, the team that I've been working with, um, here at the University of Arizona will be sharing those results from our study soon. We're excited to do so. 

Shout out to, um, Brooke Moreno and April Horne and, um, Karina Rodriguez for being excellent team members and for helping to bring the study to fruition.

Dean Deil-Amen:

Well, I mean, thank you for being here. And I mean, I know from working with you, from the people that work with you, that you are a very well-respected scholar. You are an excellent mentor and a fabulous colleague. Right? So, you have a skillset, I mean, triple threat right there. Um, so if you, if you were to give us some recommendations about books or papers that have been meaningful to you, that have influenced you, what would you recommend?

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

So, I think anybody who's working in a college or university, whether you are an administrator, whether you're a staff person, whether you are a faculty member or you're a postdoc, I think everybody needs to read Dr. Craig Steven Wilder's book Ebony and Ivy. It's a historical record of, um the United States Colleges and Universities ties to the enslavement of, uh, Black people.

So, it's an excellent read. It can really help us to understand how we've gotten to where we are today. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

All right. Well, thank you for that recommendation, and thank you for being our guest today on Inquiry Oasis. 

Dr. Leslie Gonzales:

Thank you.