Socialization and Counterspaces in Graduate Education

Abstract: When rhetoric does not match reality for higher education institutions’ commitment to community engagement, graduate students may find that counterspaces to the academy are necessary and allow them to reset and reframe, collectively organize, and push back against normative socialization processes of the academy that do not serve their needs as emerging community-engaged practitioner-scholars. Join me to learn more from this basic, exploratory qualitative study which examined professional identity development of community-engaged practitioner-scholars through participation in a community engagement professional associations’ graduate student fellowship – the Imagining America (IA) Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellows program. From 15 interviews, six major themes emerged, which were divided into two sections. The first section, the people, focused on participant backgrounds (i.e. personal/social identities, characteristics, and life experiences) and ways of work as community-engaged practitioner-scholars. The second section, the setting, focused on tension experienced within the academy during and after graduate school, as well as the experiences and development of new conceptualizations (i.e., revelations of the mind – or head), new relationships (i.e., affirmations of the heart), and new practices in their work (i.e., transformations of the hands) through participation in the IA PAGE Fellows program. While socialization (Weidman et al., 2001) toward community engagement did occur through IA and the PAGE program, these spaces also functioned in a way similar to counterspaces (Case & Hunter, 2012) and influenced participants’ professional identity development.

Narrative: Purpose and Research Question
My study was a basic, exploratory qualitative study (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) which examined professional identity development of community-engaged practitioner-scholars through participation in a community engagement professional associations’ graduate student fellowship – the Imagining America (IA) Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellows program. The guiding research question was: How does participation in a graduate fellows program offered by a community engagement professional association contribute to the professional identity development of a community-engaged practitioner-scholar?

Conceptual Framework
According to the model of graduate student socialization initially developed by Weidman, Twale, and Stein (2001), socialization represents “the processes through which individuals gain the knowledge, skills, and values necessary for successful entry into a professional career requiring an advanced level of specialized knowledge and skills (p. iii).” It also posits this “entry” includes adoption of a professional identity. With this framing of socialization and professional identity development, the model can be applied to understand socialization happening across many different disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary fields like community engagement. It can also be used to understand how the socialization process happens across different dimensions of the graduate student experience, including formal graduate programs, as well as professional and personal communities. I used the initial Weidman, Twale, and Stein model as a useful conceptual framework and starting point for my study. However, as this research was an exploratory study and inductive (not deductive), it is not explicitly tied to this model in my data collection or analysis. I also acknowledge several critiques of the model as important potential limitations to its usefulness in studying my topic, particularly around subjects of social identity (e.g., race) and values and beliefs. Further, I am interested in exploring an under-researched area of the model – graduate socialization that happens through professional communities, specifically professional associations as a type of professional community.

Methods and Data
Data collection occurred through semi-structured interviews with 15 PAGE Fellows alumni who self-identified as community-engaged scholar-practitioners and participated in the fellowship between 2008-2017. Data analysis focused on thematic analysis of interview transcriptions, using an inductive rather than a deductive approach to make meaning from the data, and two rounds of data coding. The first round used an open coding and categorization process, and the second round used a holistic coding process of theming the data focused on identifying big ideas across interviews (Saldaña, 2015). From this two-step process six major themes emerged across interviews, which were then divided into two sections.

Results
The first section, the people, focused on themes of participant backgrounds and ways of work. The second section, the setting, focused on themes of tension within the academy, new conceptualizations, new relationships, and new practices. The PAGE alumni who took part in this study were diverse in terms of identities, characteristics, and life experiences. Similarly, the way they named and went about their current work as community-engaged practitioner-scholars also varied. However, their values and motivations were similar and accompanied them on their journeys through graduate education, including the PAGE program, and into their future professional roles. IA and the PAGE program provided a necessary space for participants to move toward greater alignment of their head, heart, and hands through new conceptualizations, relationships, and practices.

Significance
Spaces of revelation, affirmation, and transformation were critical to not only participants’ ongoing professional identity development as community-engaged practitioner-scholars, but also their ability to persist through graduation in the face of challenging higher education environments. While socialization is a commonly used lens to understand graduate student professional identity development, communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) and counterspaces (Case and Hunter, 2012) are other critical lenses which provide even greater understanding of community-engaged graduate students’ experiences and identity development in more relational and communal professional development settings like the PAGE Fellows program. In particular, counterspaces both acknowledge harm and promote healing as a part of professional identity development. When rhetoric does not match reality for higher education institutions’ commitment to community engagement, community-engaged practitioner-scholars may find counterspaces to the academy are necessary and allow them to reset and reframe, collectively organize, and push back against normative socialization processes of the academy.

Ethics
This study was approved by the Michigan State University (MSU) Institutional Review Board (IRB) prior to conducting the research. The research design included informed consent practices, as well as opt out opportunities, for all participants. All data was anonymised and saved in secure, password protected locations.

Keywords
graduate student, identity development, fellowship program, professional association

References
Case, A. D., & Hunter, C. D. (2012). Counterspaces: A unit of analysis for understanding the role of settings in marginalized individuals’ adaptive responses to oppression. American Journal of Community Psychology, 50(1), 257-270.
Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2016). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Saldaña, J. (2015). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Weidman, J. C., Twale, D. J., & Stein, E. L. (2001). Socialization of graduate and professional students in higher education: A perilous passage? San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Discussant Recommendations
Diane Doberneck, Michigan State University