Jaime Lester

Everyday people making a difference on college campuses: the tempered grassroots leadership tactics of faculty and staff

This article describes a study of the tactics used by faculty and staff grassroots leaders at colleges and universities to create important changes that increase the capacity for leadership. The study identifies how academic and administrative staff, as employees within an academic culture, have access to grassroots leadership tactics that honor the norms, values and mission of the academy, while simultaneously challenging its enacted practices. The nine tactics identified are: organizing extra‐curricular intellectual opportunities; creating professional development; leveraging curricula and using classrooms as forums; working with and mentoring students; hiring like‐minded social activists; garnering resources and support; using data to tell a story; joining in – utilizing existing networks; and partnering with key external stakeholders. The study complements and adds to the grassroots leadership literature by suggesting that grassroots leadership can occur within institutionalized settings, with the techniques for change modified to fit the organizational context, in this case academic settings.

Transfer Student Engagement: Blurring of Social and Academic Engagement.

Transfer students are a distinct population. Their characteristics lead to a qualitatively different student experience. Drawing on interviews with a cross-sectional sample of transfer students at George Mason University (GMU), this study focused on the ways transfer students perceived their social and academic engagement, on the ways they engaged academically and socially at GMU, and on the ways in which their perceptions of engagement and their actual patterns of engagement affected their sense of belonging at GMU. Most notably, transfer students viewed social engagement in the context of family and community rather than college life. The findings have implications for how campuses support transfer students and question assumptions about some engagement theories.

Examining Organizational Contextual Features that Affect Implementation of Equity Initiatives.

Campuses worldwide struggle to create greater equity for different groups of students. This qualitative study examined the Equity Scorecard Project aimed at helping institutions create more equitable outcomes for all students. This article focuses on organizational contextual features that enable and inhibit implementation of these types of initiatives. The findings reveal six contextual features that are crucial when implementing projects: knowledge capacity, physical capacity, institutional willingness to reflect, project connection with institutional operations, leadership within both the team and the institution, and racial climate and intergroup relations. Detailed case examples are used to illustrate the findings.

Course Shopping in Urban Community Colleges: An Analysis of Student Drop and Add Activities

Course shopping, a widely practiced postsecondary enrollment behavior, has rarely been studied. Generally considered benign, the practice may not always prove beneficial. This study identified and named four different types of course shopping behaviors. The research compared each of the four types, finding significant differences in GPA, successful course completion, gender, and course type.

Breaking the Barriers of Essentialism in Leadership Research: Positionality as a Promising Approach

This article reviews the promise of using positionality theory for expanding our knowledge of leadership. Based on a critique of leadership studies that have traditionally maintained a simplistic view of social identities (particularly race and gender), the authors suggest that our understanding of leadership remains partial. Using empirical research results by Adrianna Kezar that examined leadership in a higher education context using a positionality theory framework, the authors describe the benefits of using this framework and the challenges faced by the researchers. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of reconceptualizing leadership research from a positionality perspective.

Starring Students: Gender Performance at a Women’s College

The purpose of this qualitative study is to better understand how gender is constructed at a women’s college. Specifically, the researchers use Judith Butler’s (1990) work on performativity to frame how members of the campus community perceive transgender students are integrated into the college. Through semi-structured interviews with faculty, staff, and students, three themes emerged: transgender students are both invisible and hyper-visible and they experience a certain degree of oppression in their lives, oppression that carries with it unique circumstances due to the location of this study. The influence of these themes on the campus community and on what it means to be a women’s college when gender is considered as performance are explored. Finally, implications of the findings for research and practice are also considered.

Regulating Gender Performances: Power and Gender Norms in Faculty Work.

Despite the steady increase of women in faculty positions over the last few decades and the research on gender norms in the academy, what remains unclear is why many female faculty continue to conform to gender norms despite their acknowledgement of the discriminatory nature of these norms, their dissatisfaction performing the norms, and the lack of benefit in tenure and promotion. In an ethnographic case study of six women in a community college, this study examines the norms that women perceive as gender specific and the regulatory powers that function to perpetuate gender norms. Results from this study illustrate how challenges to credibility, sexual and nonsexual harassment, marginalization, and role conflict function as regulatory powers.

Acting on the Collegiate Stage: Managing Impressions in the Workplace

Despite the acknowledgment of gender roles in the academy, little is known regarding the specific ways in which women faculty members manage those roles. This study applies impression-management theories and performativity to understand the specific ways in which women faculty intentionally or unintentionally alter their performances to align with gender roles. Results from this study indicate that women faculty perform their roles in close relationship to the dominant discourse characterized by the specific context, and actively and intentionally use various dramaturgical techniques (demeanor, dress, and body language) to appear in a way that is acceptable to the particular context. Furthermore, results indicate that the continuous managing of impressions led to a reconstruction of their identity, merging the identity and intentional forms of impression management.

Future Trends and Possibilities for Creating More Gender Equitable Community Colleges

A review of the articles in this issue highlights how gender as a lens, construct, and identity shapes each current issue within the community college. Using the articles in this issue as a basis, this final article provides a series of recommendations for researchers and practitioners who are interested in identifying causes, methods, and practices for creating more democratic and pluralistic environments.

The Completion Agenda: The Unintended Consequences for Equity in Community Colleges

The recent national attention to community colleges as the sector of higher education to help achieve “The Completion Agenda” and serve as a major economic driver in the United States has not considered the consequences of narrowing educational opportunity for groups of students that historically use community colleges as their gateway to higher learning. Research demonstrates that women and men from underrepresented groups disproportionally begin their higher education at community colleges. The purpose of this chapter is to unravel the complex consequences for the completion focus in the context of decreased student access to community colleges through state policies that limit enrollment and federal policies that focus on graduation rates as opposed to learning. The chapter will provide a review of the literature on barriers to student success in community colleges and discuss recent policy shifts on the federal, national, state, and institutional levels that have a detrimental but possibly unintended consequence on educational access and opportunity as it relates to gender, race, and socioeconomic class. The chapter concludes with specific recommendations of ways to promote awareness and change within individual institutions and at the state and federal levels.