Accepting Educational Responsibility for Whiteness in Academic Advising: Moving Toward Antiracist Advising Practices

• In Event: The Responsibility of Dismantling Whiteness in Higher Education

Abstract

Purpose: Academic advisors unwittingly perpetuate whiteness in academic advising through lowered expectations for students of Color, assuming what works for white students universally works for all students, and pushing whiteness-reifying activities like service learning (Sarcedo & Matias, 2018). Beyond these enactments, Yoon (2012) cautioned that whiteness-at-work appears to address these issues while perpetuating them. When whiteness-at-work permeates into academic advising, it allows academic advisors to eschew their individual and professional educational responsibility to work toward dismantling whiteness to better serve their students in an anti-racist manner. To address these entanglements, this composite counterstory (CCS) (Cook & Dixson, 2013) will develop a stronger conceptualization of how whiteness-at-work operates within academic advising by analyzing the collective experiences of academic advisors of Color.

Perspectives: Yoon (2012) described the paradox of whiteness-at-work as the everyday practices that obscure whiteness in education, such as avoiding race talk in discussions of so-called cultural competence. While whiteness in academic advising has been conceptualized (Sarcedo & Matias, 2018), the paradox of whiteness-at-work in academic advising remains undertheorized.

Methods: This CCS will counter “the master narrative in US society” (Cook & Dixson, 2013, p. 1243) regarding whiteness within academic advising to examine the paradox of whiteness-at-work therein. A theoretical exploration is a first step to understanding whiteness-at-work within academic advising, before engaging college students and advisors in research.

Sources: To develop CCS, the auto-ethnographic experiences of the author coupled with informal accounts from social media, advisor network meeting minutes, and other public sources were utilized. As an analytical tool, CCS shed light on the collective experiences (Cook & Dixson, 2013) of academic advisors of Color who must contend with whiteness-at-work within their jobs.

Findings: Within academic advising, advisors can embody the paradox of whiteness-at-work by either perpetuating whiteness or working to disrupt it on their campuses, which extends to previous work of Sarcedo and Matias (2018). Understanding this paradox is central to interrupting the endemic whiteness present on college campuses (Gusa, 2010) and within academic advising in particular (Sarcedo & Matias, 2018). Moreover, it is not until academic advisors can adequately grapple with their role in perpetuating whiteness that they can move toward anti-racist advising practices that allow them to accept their educational responsibility in dismantling whiteness.

Significance: Academic advising is key in college student success (Young-Jones, Burt, Dixon, & Hawthorne, 2013), so conceptualizing how whiteness-at-work operates within academic advising is significant in addressing social and educational justice through higher education. This sets the stage for future empirical research on academic advising to disrupt whiteness, help in dismantling white supremacy in higher education, and push the field of academic advising to account for its role in sustaining individual attitudes and behaviors, departmental cultures, and university policies and systems that actively and passively harm marginalized college students and perpetuate educational inequities.

Author

• Geneva L. Sarcedo, University of Colorado - Denver