(Re)imagining professional development spaces for graduate students and emerging community-engaged practitioner-scholars

Abstract: Do you support, advocate, or develop programs for graduate students and/or emerging community-engaged practitioner-scholars? Are you new to community-engaged work and looking for professional development opportunities? Join this roundtable to engage in learning, reflection, and discussion about creating supportive, communal, and whole person focused professional development spaces for graduate students and/or community-engaged practitioner-scholars. Take away inspiration for your own professional context, role, and journey!

Narrative: Format
The format for this session is a Topical Discussion. Specifically, this roundtable session will focus on idea generation related to professional development of the next generation of community-engaged leaders through the creation of professional development spaces that align with principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. In particular, it will focus on creating supportive, communal, and whole-person focused professional development spaces that promote learning and community building for community-engaged practitioner-scholars.

Goals
As they seek to engage with ideas around supportive, communal, and whole person focused professional development spaces that promote learning and community building for graduate students and emerging community-engaged practitioner-scholars, participants will:
Learn about other’s experiences through stories from current community-engaged practitioner-scholars who were also once graduate students,
Learn about the Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellowship as one potential model for creating supportive, communal, and whole-person focused professional development spaces,
Reflect on related personal experiences with professional development for community engagement,
Imagine the kinds of professional development spaces needed to support a diverse field of community engagement professionals, and
Take away inspiration and ideas for moving toward that more inclusive vision for the field of community engagement.

Conceptual Foundation
While socialization (Gardner, 2009; Weidman & DeAngelo, 2020; Weidman, Twale, & Stein, 2001) 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 IA PAGE Fellows program. These lenses can also apply to community-engaged practitioner-scholars. 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.

Significance
This session draws inspiration from the following request for proposals questions: How does research/scholarship inform and support accessible and inclusive SLCE practice? and What are the SLCE innovations around access and inclusion that guide best practice for scholarship? Specifically, it seeks to provoke conversation about creating supportive, communal, whole person focused professional development spaces that promote learning and community building for emerging community-engaged practitioner-scholars and/or graduate students, drawing from recent research (Van Schyndel, 2022). It also showcases the Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellowship as one potential model for doing so, drawing from perspectives of PAGE Fellows alumni who are now further along in their professional journeys. The resulting conversation and ideas may spark further research on this topic, as well as evaluation and revision of practices and policies in various spaces charged with professional development for graduate students and/or community-engaged practitioner-scholars.

Plan
The session will first frame the kinds of professional development spaces currently available to graduate students and emerging community-engaged practitioner scholars (academic programs, fellowships, workshops, etc.). Next it will provide perspectives from 15 self-identified community-engaged practitioner-scholars (who were also once graduate students) through storytelling based on interviews completed during a recent qualitative research study (Van Schyndel, 2022). This research study focused on one kind of professional development space - the Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellowship program. Findings from this study demonstrate that the PAGE Fellows alumni who take part in this fellowship are diverse in identities, characteristics, and life experiences. Similarly, the way they name and go about their work as community-engaged practitioner-scholars also varies. However, their values and motivations are similar and accompanied them on their journeys through graduate education, including the PAGE program, and into their future professional roles. 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. This space of revelation, affirmation, and transformation was critical to their ongoing professional identity development as community-engaged practitioner-scholars, to building a community of individuals supportive of this kind of work, and in some cases their ability to persist through graduation in the face of challenging higher education environments. After hearing these stories, participants will engage in an individual reflective and creative writing activity examining their own professional development experiences as emerging community-engaged practitioner-scholars and/or graduate students or their experiences in roles that seek to support these types of individuals. Then participants will connect as a large group (or multiple small groups depending on number of participants) to share their personal experiences, ask questions, and discuss effective and inclusive approaches to organizing spaces that aim to support the professional development of those new to the community engagement field.

Ethics
Van Schyndel’s 2022 research 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, practitioner-scholar, professional development

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.
Gardner, S. K. (2009). The development of doctoral students: Phases of challenge and support [Monograph]. ASHE Higher Education Report, 34(6), 1-127.
Van Schyndel, T. L. (2022). A Qualitative Inquiry into Community-Engaged Practitioner-Scholar Professional Identity Development through Participation in a Community Engagement Association’s Graduate Student Fellowship (Publication No. 29998567) [Doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
Weidman, J. C., & DeAngelo, L. (Eds.). (2020). Socialization in higher education and the early career: Theory, research and application. New York City, NY: Springer.
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.