This interview with Dr. Mica Estrada explores her work in researching belonging, social identity, and kindness. Beginning with an exploration of impostor phenomena, we first explore stories about Donna Hicks’s direct experience at being affirmed and welcomed. Returning to Estrada’s research, we examine the impact of Dr. Kellman and the development of a social integration model of self-efficacy, identity, and values. This model has been used to explore the experiences of minoritized students in STEM fields and community responses to climate change. The episode closes with examinations of belonging and stereotype threat and the power of kindness and accompaniment as dignity-affirming practices.
The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.
This interview with Dr. Mica Estrada explores her work in researching belonging, social identity, and kindness. Beginning with an exploration of impostor phenomena, we first explore stories about Donna Hicks’s direct experience at being affirmed and welcomed. Returning to Estrada’s research, we examine the impact of Dr. Kellman and the development of a social integration model of self-efficacy, identity, and values. This model has been used to explore the experiences of minoritized students in STEM fields and community responses to climate change. The episode closes with examinations of belonging and stereotype threat and the power of kindness and accompaniment as dignity-affirming practices.
The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.
I know you can talk about differences without violating people's dignity. You can be very angry at a person without violating someone's dignity. And I think same, the same thing is kindness, right? We can treat people in a kind way. Even if we're not agreeing with them. We're always gonna have differences with each other. This is part of the human condition. That how we deal with our communications when we have those differences is central to what kind of community and planet we're going to have.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:You are listening to season four of the music and peacebuilding podcast, a podcast season focused on multifaceted textures of belonging. Our podcast explores intersections of peacebuilding, sacredness, community, creativity and imagination through research and story. Dr. Mica Estrada received her PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard University. She serves at the University of California, San Francisco as the Associate Dean of diversity, inclusion and equity for the School of Nursing. She is also a professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Institute for Health and Ageing. Her research program focuses on social influence, including the study of identity values, forgiveness, well being and integrative Education. Dr. Estrada utilizes the tripartite integration model of social influence to inform the design and assessment of educational interventions. Dr. Estrada's work focuses on ethnic populations that are historically underrepresented in higher education, most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and are providing diverse and creative solutions. As a leading scholar on issues of diversity and inclusion. She is currently serving on a national research council roundtable, and was recently selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as a facilitator scholar. This conversation continues from part one with Donna Hicks, with conversations about empirical examinations of social identity, belonging, stereotype threat, kindness and dignity. We begin with an excerpt from Donna Hicks, as Donna spoke about how Mica Estrada impacted her sense of belonging at Harvard. So I'm going to read some of these questions because I put some thought into them. So I wanted to first ask you about your story of entering Harvard because I believe that in that story, I heard the play of imposter phenomena. And then the restorative language of belonging when a new colleague tells you, we've been waiting for you. So could you tell us about the experience of belonging, an imposter phenomena, and then how it informed your early understandings of dignity? If we start there?
Donna Hicks:No one has ever asked me that question. This is just fascinating. So I'm going to be just thinking out loud with you on that question? So yes, I did all my graduate work at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I was there for 15 years, got four degrees. And leaving there felt like ripping myself away from you know, talk about belonging, I felt like that was where I belonged, yet I had this opportunity to go to Harvard, I was asked, you know, Professor, Herbert Kelman said, come to Harvard, and we have a wonderful program, and all the things that you're interested in the social psychological dimensions of international conflict. And my, you know, my brain said, yes, yes, you've got to go there. But my heart was so torn. I don't want to leave Madison, Wisconsin. But then I got there, I got to Harvard. And I was looking around and thinking, Oh, my gosh, what am I doing here? You know, spent all these years in the Midwest, where people were just really friendly and open. And I'm thinking, I don't think this is going to be this way here. What am I going to run back home? And, and so one day, I did decide, alright, just jump in. I said to myself, just jump in, literally jump, go to the gym, take a class and you know, get your, you know, get yourself centered. And so I did, I went in to this gym and was going to a class. And the person at the desk told me to go to the to the locker room, leave my things in locker went in there. And I realized that oh my gosh, you were supposed to bring your own lock. And I stood there in despair, thinking, Oh, I'm not walking the mile back to my to my apartment to get a lock. And this one woman stood there and said, Are you okay? And I said, Oh no, I just didn't realize I was supposed to bring a lock and she said, Oh, come on. Just share mine with me. Don't worry about it. total stranger. Right total stranger. And so then she said. So tell me, what are you doing here? And I said, Oh, I'm going to be doing a postdoc with Professor Herbert Kelman. And she looked at me and she said, Donna, is that you? And I said, Yes, who are you? And she said, I'm Mica. I'm Mica Estrada, we've been waiting for you, we can't wait to have you come and join our group. And so all of that makes me want to weep right now just thinking about it. But all of those fears of not fitting in, you know, not being, you know, one of these Harvard intellectual types. And even though as I told you, I got five degrees from the University of Wisconsin, you know, I did wonder whether I was going to fit in. And lo and behold, Mica Estrada comes into my life and totally changes that. And the next day, I went into Professor Kelman's office met all of the people who are in his program, there were about maybe 10 graduate students and a couple of postdocs, too. And Kevin, they were so warm and welcoming. And I felt like an immediate connection, immediate, and it was because of their generosity, you know. And I think Mica also understood, she saw my despair in that locker room. And it wasn't just despair that I didn't bring my lock. It was I think she saw something deeper. And she was right. And to, and to have somebody see you in that way to be seen and experienced in that way. It just all the boundaries just dissolved for me. And I felt and to this day, we have a connection mica and I. And so those fears are real, you know, they're, I don't want to minimize them for myself or for other people as well going into a new situation like that and wondering whether you know, you're going to this is going to be right for you. And so that's I liked the way you juxtaposed it with you know, the imposter syndrome and the, the need for belonging.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Yeah, I should tell you that, you know, so I read your book years ago, and your leadership book as well. And then like, two or three months ago, I said, I'm gonna go back and reread your book, because this entire season, I'm focusing on belonging, and how it intersects with peacebuilding. And I, I went back to read your book to see, does dignity have a conversation to have with belonging? And so that was one of the things that jumped out early to me as I read your book. So
Donna Hicks:I think it's fundamental. I mean, you can't feel connected with other people unless, you know, there's some sense of belonging. It's I think it's the glue. You know, that. And, you know, we all want that. We don't like being out on the margins and isolated, right, right.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:In the moments when we cross new thresholds, we may carry feelings of impostor phenomena about our enoughness and whether we belong. The uncertainty of our enoughness increases anxiousness, and cognitive load. Part of what Geoffrey Cohen names as belonging uncertainty. In the book, The Art of gathering, Priya Parker uses examples of hosts at a dinner party, as a talented dinner host welcomes each for their unique value in who they are, they relieve individuals of hidden uncertainties, or impostor feelings that they may carry. Sitting with Hicks' scholarship, I see that the repair of states of uncertainty is in connection, a connection to our own dignity and that of others offers us the rest, the embrace that we belong, just as we are. In her book, and in our discussions, Donna spoke about Ariella Berry and mica Estrada as offering this sense of dignity affirming and boundary lowering welcome. Ariella berry lives in Israel within the community of Neve Shalom, modeling a lived practice of hospitality and belonging as Israeli Jews and Palestinians living together. How do we craft expressions of"we have been waiting for you?" Out of the embrace of our own enoughness I turned the question of first moments of welcome to Mica Estrada to ask how she remembered these moments with
Mica Estrada:I do remember her arriving I do remember where her Donna. office was across from mine. I do remember that. It wasn't real clear when she arrived like how she had gotten. It was like cuz she wasn't a student, like us, we knew that she had been invited by my advisor, Herb Kelman. And that had happened other times where people just kind of arrived that he had invited. And so I think being Latina and being someone who really values community I'm I always try to cultivate community wherever I am. In that case, the community that was central was PICAR, that the program for international conflict analysis and resolution, which didn't exist when I first got there. The people that were working with herb Kelman on international problem solving workshops, moved towards institutionalizing the organization. But that community of people who was involved in that work, were probably my primary well, they were my primary people. When I was there, my cohort was also really important to me. And they were, that was another place where I was thought it was important to build community, I was the only one doing it as a social psychologist, so I study community and study how community forms and how people become part of community. So it's a personal interest, but it's also part of my academic interests, and how to restore community after there's been conflict and hurt and pain.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Before I get into the research, I do an ask about Herb Kelman, because I see how much he's mattered to you and how much he's mattered to Donna, I noticed that as I read your 2011 article and the article on climate change, that the tripartite model is very much informed by his work. And I wonder if you might open up with about the ways in which studying with him, changed you and impacted you?
Mica Estrada:Yeah, I mean, he, he was a great mind. Even in the last couple of years of his life, I would read his stuff and forget just how brilliant just what a brilliant man he was. But I think the thing that always impressed me the most about Herb was, he had high standards for integrity, and for living in alignment with values and thoughts. And so he had studied ethics, he had written about ethics, he had been a child in Austria when the Holocaust began, and he fled. So he was quite concerned about people following orders that would hurt people. So while he had a huge impact on the research and the work that I have done, I think that the role model of living into your truth always resonates with me. And I was, I was really grateful to have an advisor who I admired in that way, he wasn't perfect, and he definitely didn't always get everything, right. And there were times I disagreed with him. But overall, I loved him, you know, as a human being, and he mattered to me all the way through to the end. So in terms of the research, the story is that I went to go visit him and he had just published an article in the annual psychology review, that kind of reviewed his research from the 1950s, all the way through to 2007, or eight I can't remember what year that that was published. So I was reading that on the train, when I went to a conference in DC, that was on the under representation of minorities, Latinos, Native Americans, African Americans in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine fields. So I think having reading his work, revisiting his work, and then being in this environment, where they're trying to figure out how to how to keep people in academia, I kind of saw that maybe they could inform that the work that he was doing, about how people integrate into community could inform how looking at how do students and people integrate into their disciplines, and into their, into their communities. And so that's I went back and started collecting data was able to show that Yeah, in fact, his his theory is about needing to, when we're part of a community, being able to do what the community does, when we're part of a community, starting to identify ourselves as that part of the community and then internalizing the values of that community that, that when we do all three of those things, we become highly integrated into a community we do what the group does, we identify and we internalize the values when you have those three. And then when you're really integrated, you start to teach others those things, right, you start to bring them in like with Donna to naming a part of our community, you know, your you can identify as part of our group. So it's really about how do we become community and belonging is a piece of it, but it's just a small piece of it. There's there's other aspects to being part of community than belonging, but if you don't have a longing, it's hard to be a part of a community.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think I remember that article. Actually. It's the article where he kind of identifies decade by decade, kind of his movement through academia. Yeah, that's
Mica Estrada:right. Yeah, yeah. And you can see how his early work on compliance and obedience how it starts to inform the conflict resolution work, and how do you form and create environments that are supportive of people being able to talk across differences and across painful histories. He always was looking at the same things, but he applied it to different environments all the way through. And then I think Donna really took the work one step further by naming the importance of dignity. I think he never really did that. And I thought that her work was really important. She named, named the unnamed in that environment.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Dr. Herb Kelman had a significant influence on the scholarship of Dr. Donna Hicks and Dr. Mica Estrada. Kelman has spent a lifetime of channeling social psychological inquiry to understand how the social motivations of individuals impact larger contexts of international relations. His 1950s leadership in the Baltimore Congress of Racial Equality, seemed to offer Kelman lessons in the role of individuals within the micro and macro processes of social change. As Kelman's 1950, a theory of motivation evolved, Kelman named rule, role and value orientations as a process of socialization and re socialization within groups. Estrada translated and updated Kelman's rule role and value framework into a tripartite model of social influence that can be used to study processes of belonging, inclusion in STEM fields, and responses to existential threats like climate change. The tripartite model Center's self efficacy, identity and values to describe the socialization process by which an individual identifies and persists as a scientist. I would like to ask about the 2011 article first about scientific communities and then do the climate change piece. So if we introduce for the listeners, this tripartite model that includes self efficacy, identity and value, I was wondering if you might open that up for listeners. And what I was fascinated about is about how these three factors mediate and how they're also different depending on context as like the how, how they work when we talk about belonging within a scientific community. So could you open that up for us?
Mica Estrada:Yeah, so like I said, if you can do the science, in this case, I and you identify, I am a scientist, and you feel like the scientific endeavor is valuable, like it's a good use of your time that it brings you truth, you know, there's these elements of the value system of that society of that group. If you have all three, you're going to be most integrated. And I think you don't have to have all three, to be a part of a group belonging is kind of a piece of identification. I think when we feel belonging, we're more likely to identify with the group, if we don't feel belonging, we're less likely to identify with the group and in the measurements that I use, there's a question about belonging within the identity element, but that they are separate, right? So you can feel like I can do the science, I have the capability, I have the efficacy, I have confidence, I can do this. But I really don't feel like I'm a scientist, like, I'm not a part of that community. But I don't belong in that community. So those two things are not the same. And they do operate separately, but they can occur together. And the same thing with the identity and values, you could say, Wow, the values of this group really, really, they're really my values. But man, I don't feel like I belong in this room. I like I don't I can't identify with this group of people. I, I do think that science can lead us out of our problems. And do you think it has really great value, but when I go into the lab, and I'm the only woman and I'm the only woman of color, and it's all white men, and they barely talk to me, and in some cases make fun of me? I don't want to be I can't identify that group, right. So they can be separate from each other. And one of the things the 2011 article shows that all three are important, but when you look at them, to see what is most uniquely predicting persistence in in the sciences, a year after they graduate as undergraduates, we find that it's identity and values. There's an article in 2018 that I published, it looks at four years after they graduate what predicts using the same kind of structural equation model. And what we found still is that the identity is the one that really predicts whether people stay in STEM or not. And in that 2018 article, we look at what what leads to or what's How does identity and values and efficacy mediate the relationship between having research experience or having quality mentorship. So people have high quality mentorship that leads them to greater identification and value endorsement, they're more likely to persist. So we asked about the mediation they mediate. Also for research experience, when you have research experience at least two semesters, and that leads to greater identification and value endorsement you're more likely to go on.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Estrada's 2011 Study reviewed 1053 minority science students from 50 universities to understand the integration and persistence challenges that minoritized students face in science. In this study, self efficacy, identity and values worked together and separately, to describe diverse paths to scientific community integration. With self efficacy, we need to believe we have adequate capacity to contribute as we enter a new field of study. As we persist, we appear to need to see ourselves as identifying with the community. And we need to sense that our values align. Thus, in this study, identity and values mattered to students' sense of belonging, and persistence within scientific communities. Given that self efficacy, identity and values are intertwined, and uniquely influential, how do these factors impact belonging within other communities? When does a factor help us cross a threshold to belong? What factors might help us persist beyond an initial acceptance? What I think I remember from the articles that is kind of challenging that, prior to that time, we had kind of a hyper focus on self efficacy as being the defining metric by which a person feels like they belong to a scientific community. And you're, you're opening up this idea that self efficacy matters. But it also needs to have these other things alongside it. That's true.
Mica Estrada:And if you look at the literature, most of the research is done in the STEM area with efficacy. Really, the long term impacts are like a month or two at most, most people don't look at a year two, three years later. So you have to really watch when you're looking in the literature, how far out is the outcome? So what we know is that the identity is is an indicator for longer term choices in the direction of persistence for those fields. And the efficacy doesn't have that same, it relates, but it doesn't, it's not the Because you can you can think about it is a person who's studying right, you might feel like, well, I can really do this, I'm in my senior year at college, I love it. I'm really great at this, and then you start your graduate program, you're like, Oh, my God, all these people are brilliant, like, I don't know, if I really and your efficacy goes down a little while, and then you know, it might build back up, and then you get a new job, and it drops again, so that efficacy is not quite as stable across time. And so it doesn't have that longer term. It doesn't always have the longer term, sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:So if we flip to climate change. What I also understand there is that many of the models that we have looked at with climate change have looked at like the individual, the individual choices, the individual behavior. And I think that when you channel Herb Kelman and you move into this model, you're asking about the individual, but you're also asking what's the individual's relationship to the social, and that the social matters when we're talking about a major crisis that's facing us? So could you also then translate, like, how do self efficacy, identity and value work in this context, when we're talking about climate change action?
Mica Estrada:I think the interesting thing for me when I was when I was directing the climate education partners, and we were doing this research, was we used it in a diagnostic way. So for instance, with the with this, the science that with the STEM field, identity was often a hard one to like that was the one that you're trying to build often is identity. It's kind of the weaker piece that particularly for marginalized people that you have to change the environment to help build that up. But when you got into talking to him, we were mostly working with leaders, decision makers, key influentials in San Diego and then we did a larger kind of polling of the larger community. What we found was that overall, people had identity. You know, people did care, they would say, Yeah, I'm part of that community that's concerned about climate change. But they often didn't know what to do. The efficacy was the one that's where the weakness was. It's very few people that you'll find that say, Yeah, we want to destroy the planet, like there's this. That's the value of trying to keep the planet going. It's pretty high. There's a lot of disagreement on why, why there might be climate change. There's, you know, especially at that time has changed a little bit now, but there's a lot of disagreement on, there's a lot of agreement on the value of being good to the planet overall. There's disagreements on why it's happening or what's what's a threat. There's pretty much a lot of people identify that they are concerned, especially as we've seen things change a lot more. But that efficacy was the diagnostic element, like people don't know what to do, how, as I how, as an individual, do I stop this from happening? And that's where we have work to do. And I would say in other areas of psychology, we know that when we're under threat, when we're feeling fear when we're feeling threat, feeling like we don't know what to do. accompaniment is really important community is really important and helps us to navigate when we're uncertain. And so, I think with addressing climate change communities can be is and continues to be really important for for people to continue to do the work necessary to change our trajectory right now.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:As we face daunting challenges like ecological collapse, it is worth remembering that prior generations also faced challenges that required communal accompaniment, and small persevering steps. Faced with overwhelming challenge, where do we find steps of change and our belief in our capacity? How do we converse toward connective values and open space for diverse identities? How might dignity guide our first steps and offer a shared grounding of connection? Angela Lederach's book, feel the grass grow, witnesses ecological peacebuilding practices among campesinos in Colombia. She and her Colombian conversants name accompaniment as something that offers perseverance, hope, grounding and social connection. Accompaniment recasts peacebuilding as an ongoing practice of, quote, presence and attention. Accompaniment builds persistence, and sustained action across what might otherwise be debilitating challenges of conflict. I wanted to ask you about values or having read Steele and having read Cohen and all the literature about stereotype threat. You know, there's, there's the wonderful literature that happens, I think, around 2006 or so where they start to identify that it you know, if a teacher comes in, and they ask students to write down their values, that it seems to mitigate stereotype threat, especially for marginalized students, and maybe has an impact on academics later on. And you've been approaching values as well, but maybe slightly differently. Talk about the ways in which you ask questions about the ways in which people adopt the values of a group and what you have learned about values from a social psychology lens?
Mica Estrada:A great question. Yeah, there's different people approach values in different ways. So there's a lot of research where it's like, here's a list of values and which ones they endorse, there's been work done, like internationally to see what are kind of common values for different communities, different cultural groups, there has, I think the work that you're referring to has people talk about, like what it says kind of affirming self of like, This is who I am, this is what matters to me. And by having that kind of reflection on self affirming experiences, then that kind of buffers the, I think the in their terms kind of the self, so that when you have an assault in some way or a threat to your self image, you're kind of have a little bit of lining to, to buffer it a little bit. So what I was looking at, when I first started doing this research, I actually went to Scripps Research Institute. And I had people write down what they thought the values of the science community was. And so they wrote, people wrote lists and lists and lists and I took the top ones, like the top 30. And I went back and I had them rate, which ones were the most important they thought or most central. And then from that I took the top ones and I met created that scientific value measure. So this was like not what is your personal value, but what is what is your community value? What are the values of your community? They were very specific to the community. They weren't like, we value truth. It was more like we value spending long hours to advance knowledge. You know, or we we believe that by doing this, this work, we can make the world a better place. Yeah. So it's there were kind of these larger value statements really of what the community agreed upon why this was noble, good work to do. But that differentiates it and it's, and the questions the way I asked it was, how much does this person describe you? And a person, Who does, Who thinks da-da-da-da, as opposed to them just generating a value list? So, but it is different?
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:And am I correct? If I say that, when you start to identify with the values of a community, that's also another pathway into belonging? Or do you not define it that way? So
Mica Estrada:I think it can happen one of two ways. So community has a set a type of value system, most almost every community has a value system was even basketball teams will have a value system, you know, what they what rules they have, they think are important and such. You could either someone finds the group and says, Well, they have the same values I do, right? This this church group, whatever, that that's me. And it's like, they already carry it with them and they go, Wow, that's I just fit like a glove. The other way is that you actually modify yourself, right? You start to adjust yourself so that you then do endorse those values. So when you hang out with a group of people, you might start where you never ever watch wrestling, right? Like you think it's barbaric for these people to wrestle, but you hang out with these people, they're really fun, you spend a lot of time with them, they tend to get lots of food and have a great time watching wrestling over time, your your value that, that it's barbaric kind of changes, you start to think of it as fun and your value system changes, so that you can fit into that group. So I think it can happen either way, I think you can arrive where it's just a complete fit or, or you feel like you have to kind of move you move yourself over time to endorse those values to understand the values to make them feel like they're really yours. And then I think with the work with STEM for me, one of the things I've argued about is that the value system of the STEM field often is very individualistic. And for people who come from come from cultures that are more community based, it doesn't fit well. And that perhaps if we want to increase persistence and increase inclusion, the value system of the disciplines actually, and the scientific enterprise needs to enlargen so that it can be more connected to people of many different cultures.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:"Stereotypes can be harmful because they undermine the safety of group membership, fixate attributes and flatten the diversity of our uniqueness." Individuals experience stereotype threat when they encounter difficulty in a situation that has associated stereotypes. Claude Steele, notes stereotype threat can increase doubt, uncertainty, and have a detrimental effect on performance. To counter stereotype threat, Cohen Steele and others developed a kind of values affirmation methodology. When teachers ask students about their values, this appears to communicate a desire to know a student with greater depth and individuation than the limitations of stereotype. "A 2006 study by Cohen found that values affirmed minoritized students demonstrated greater academic resilience than a control condition as they came upon challenging classroom assignments. In follow up studies, this treatment effect appeared to have lasted as long as two to nine years. Minoritized students are those likely to question their belonging in a majority context were most impacted." As Estrada notes, her approach to values is different. Drawing on the work of Schwartz et al in the portrait value questionnaire, Estrada asked participants about the degree to which they felt similar to someone who, as an example, "thinks discussing new theories and ideas is thrilling," and other scientific value prompts. What I find fascinating about the totality of values work is the connective force of our beliefs and valuations. With values, we come to be known and individuated. And we connect with others through a shared sense of what matters. Donna Hicks dignity model seeks to find the root of our most foundational values about universal dignity. Dignity is a value that can connect us across boundary lines and open channels of listening to the worth and value of each human being. Mica Estrada took this work of dignity and translated it into the work of affirmations or kindness. Estrada defines kindness, quote, "as an act or quality of action that conveys in subtle and sometimes obvious ways, respect for the dignity of another person." Whether held in the micro expression of a tone of voice or in the macro gestures of welcome, affirmations build identity and belonging within spaces that might otherwise be sites of uncertainty or threat. So, kindness, so, in your 2018 article, you recognize that much of the discourse on persistence has focused on individual characteristics like grit, goals and determination. And that when the social is considered, it's usually considered in a deficit term, and in terms of maybe threats or aggression. And so what I think I understand is that you're you're arguing for for another dimension, that there is a social element that is affirming, and it can be micro and macro. So would you introduce kindness to us, and I also want to get to how you tie kindness to dignity. But I will let you start by introducing kindness to us and where it fits in this in the whole picture.
Mica Estrada:Yeah, so as I was doing the research on the tripartite integration model of social influence, I think what where it leads you naturally is, how would the environment, the social context of disciplines of academia, how would it need to change in order for it to be a place where people want to stay? That's really, I think, what drew me over into thinking about what is it that is making people not integrate into their discipline communities. And that really led me to the concept of, of kindness, which, for me, I defined it as an act that affirms the dignity of another person. It's an action that it's, I think, dignity, having our dignity is really important. But the action of supporting another person affirming another person's dignity, I think, is the act of kindness. And when kindness, when we experience kindness, a piece of our, we feel as if we are being affirmed in some way as a human. And so that's where that's where it began. And I wrote that article. And the way I described it in, I didn't put in the article, when I talk about it, I think about like a garden. And in a garden, if you have a fruit, fruits and things that you've planted, if you look at it, and you look where the weeds grow, the weeds always grow in the places where healthy plants are not growing. So a lot of times when we're approaching diversity, inclusion, and equity, and we're talking about racism, and prejudice, and discrimination and stereotype threat, all of those things that we're talking about are like, how do we get the how do we get all the weeds out? Right? How do we get all the weeds out? And one of the things I was taught was to plant densely healthy plants. So there's less space for the for the weeds to grow. So what does that mean, to grow, to grow things that are healthy? That to me is the micro and macro affirmations, that is kindness, those are the things if that is really growing in an environment in a social environment, you have these positive things happening, there's less space for all the negative stuff to be coming up. So yes, let's pull out racism, let's pull out discrimination, let's pull out all of those things. But at the same time, let's plant stuff that's healthy into our environments, and really nurture that so that there's less space for all those things to come back again. And I think a lot of times, we don't do that piece. And so it just comes back in another form.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Your 2019 Study fascinated me. It's almost like it's a three part structure. In one graph, you had scientific self efficacy, and then intentions to persist. And the other graph, you had micro affirmation, scientific identity and intentions to persist. It's a mediated model. And it's a model on which all three need each other. Could you talk about the interdependence, macro affirmations just by themself aren't enough, but we need them to either build up an identity or build up self efficacy? Yeah,
Mica Estrada:I mean, in the context of this was undergraduates. And so it's exactly what you said that what we found was that when people experienced micro affirmations, they, to the extent that that helps to build their efficacy, their sense that they do the science, or to the extent that it helps them to build a sense of identity as a scientist, then they're more likely to persist. And I think that that's just because you need those the identity and you need the efficacy. They're essential. For persisting, this is really kind of a precursor in some ways to the kindness work, because it was an attempt to see like, what is it in the social environment that helps to produce and elevate and help people to, to gain those elements that are necessary for integration into their community. I've now have a research project that's we're about ready to submit it, where we actually ask about kindness directly. And we use Donna Hicks' measure. So we used I went to Donna's work on dignity. And in the 2018 article, I talked about the measurement, a potential measurement for kindness. But we actually did it. So among academics, mostly faculty members, we ask them at how much do they receive kindness using those kinds of 10 elements from Donna's work? And then how much do they act in a way that's kind in their world, in their work world? And then we also measured institutional identity, how much do they identify with the institutions, their well being and their stress levels. And what we found was that when people receive kindness, they're more likely to identify with their institutions. And then they're more likely to have better wellbeing and lower stress. But acting in a kind way didn't have that relationship at all. So it really had to do with how much they felt they were receiving. And I think that that has to do because if you're giving if you feel like you're really kind of no one's kind back to you, that is not that does not, not so helpful, that this is a study that's really done with faculty, thinking about academia as a work environment, and just how important that receiving kindness, having our dignities affirmed, is really important to building up a sense of identity within the institution. And then there's outcomes that are good with that.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:If if we think about this being an audience of peacebuilders, music, teachers, other kinds of teachers, you know, most of your expertise has been in scientific forms of community. But what are the pieces of this that we should be asking about as we think about diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in so many places where there may be communities that don't feel as welcomed? And how do you build a more expansive community?
Mica Estrada:Yeah, I think you go back to some of the work of Donna Hicks. And when she talks about dignity, the way that we operationalized it in terms of receiving kindness is, is do you feel free to express your authentic self without being negatively judged? Wouldn't that be great - that your efforts and thoughtfulness and talents are positively recognized? You feel concerned and experience experiences were acknowledged as valid, others convey you were included, others actions made you feel safe with them, you were treated fairly, your choices were respected, others made an effort to understand you, you're given the benefit of the doubt, which is often lacking when we're working with people who we have conflict with. And you receive an apology when your dignity felt violated. Those are the way that we've been measuring kindness, really building on Donna's work. But I think that those are central to any type of environment where we're trying to communicate, whether we have differences or similarities. I think that I'm Associate Dean for Diversity Inclusion outreach in the School of Nursing at UCSF, and we recently have had difficulties I guess, with different communities in both regard to the the war in Gaza. And, and we have people from all sides, right within our community who are feeling hurt. And I came back to looking at these because I thought, okay, we, regardless of what is happening, and how much pain people are feeling, our is our community receiving this, from the Leadership isn't receiving this from from our community, is their dignity is still being held. And so. So I think when we're doing work in conflict resolution spaces, these are things to train towards, right are these things here? Are they not here? And if they're not here, how do we, how do we ensure they're here because I know you can talk about differences without violating people's dignity. You can be very angry at a person without violating someone's dignity, doesn't mean that you're in complete alignment. And I think same, the same thing is kindness, right? We can treat people in a kind way. Even if we're not agreeing with them. We don't have to annihilate who they are in the process of it. So we're always gonna have differences with each other. This is part of the human condition, that how we deal with our communications when we have those differences, is really central to what kind of community and planet we're going to have and I'll add this. A lot of academia was established through people who were colonizers, and the education system was structured to really disassemble the heart from the head, you're not going to be able to enslave people, you're not going to be able to commit genocide, if your heart's too connected to your head. And our early education system was really landed? people being educated to exploit the planet and exploit people. So, kindness, if you are too kind, you are not going to be able to do those types of things. So our education system pulled apart that heart and the head. And really the work on kindness for me is like how do we remember to connect, reconnect these things, and to recognize that this kind of colonized mindset is actually destroying us, it makes us hurt each other and it makes us hurt our planet. And we don't have space anymore for that. So it's, it's a paradigm shift in our education system to think that kindness will really matter, in how we treat each other, how we educate each other, how we work with each other. And it's dissembling or taking apart, a legacy that was really built on exploitation.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:At the closure of his book on belonging, Cohen writes, quote,"it may seem unrealistic to expect that teachers should love their students. But the more I delve into the research on teaching, the more it seems to converge on the importance of love, of faith we choose to have in the inherent worth, and dignity of another human being. Stereotypes undermine this faith, constricting our hearts, blinding us to one another's full humanity." The scholarship of Mica Estrada and Donna Hicks offers pathways of connection, kindness, affirmation and belonging. As we utter the words, we've been waiting for you, we cross thresholds of doubt, to enter doors of kindness and welcome. May we come to believe in our capacity, and illuminate inner lights of individuality in a shared glow of community. A poem taken from the language and stories of this two part podcast may dignity be our garden, to the unfolding of close rows of possibility, of capacity for the seeds of the next generation of kindness. May belonging be our guide of below to entangled roots and nurturance of shared abundance. And when the vulnerability of separation becomes too much a reality, may we be reminded, we are all soil, partnering nutrients of marvelous diversity, interconnection, a rooted embrace, belonging, and dignity. Special thanks to Dr. Mica Estrada and Dr. Donna Hicks for their time in producing this podcast. Our episode webpage contains an extensive reference list of some of Dr. Estrada's scholarship. As a starting point, I highly recommend her 2018 article with colleagues on the influence of affirming kindness and community on broadening participation in STEM career pathways. This episode frequently pulls from the work of Claude Steele's Whistling Vivaldi and Geoffrey Cohen's text on belonging. Also found on our website. Dr. Hicks books on dignity are published by Yale University Press her 2,021/10 Anniversary Edition, Dignity, Its essential role in resolving conflict is a must read on elements and constructions of dignity. Her 2018 book leading with dignity, how to create a culture that brings out the best in people is an essential book for fostering practices of leadership, that center the flourishing of dignity. This is the music and peacebuilding podcast hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson. At Elizabethtown college we host a Master of Music Education, with an emphasis in peacebuilding. thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care. Join us at music peacebuilding.com