Reimagining U.S. Graduate Education: A Critical Integrative Analysis of Socialization, Campus Climate, and Social Identity Perspectives

• In Event: Critiques for Transformation: Reimagining Colleges and Communities for Social Justice

Abstract

While graduate education is designed to cultivate students’ expertise in their disciplines or fields of study (Gardner & Mendoza, 2010; Golde & Dore, 2001), it is also constructed to perpetuate social inequalities and hegemonic constructions of scholarship and of practice (Griffin et al., 2012; Posselt, 2020). Accordingly, research literature about graduate education in the U.S. typically uses three conceptual lenses: (a) socialization (Van Maanen & Schein, 1979; Weidman et al., 2001), (b) campus climate (Hurtado et al., 2012; Milem et al., 2005), and (c) social identity construction and development (Chickering & Reisser, 1993; Jones & McEwen, 2000; Abes et al., 2019) to understand how graduate students learn and are affected by their educational environments. While each has its strengths, these lenses do not sufficiently attend to power and how it operates in graduate education, and in doing so they do not fully honor the agency and humanity of graduate students as they negotiate the complexities of contemporary graduate education. Furthermore, these lenses do not adequately attend to how graduate students learn about equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), which is increasingly important if graduate education is to play an active role in addressing systemic injustice in higher education and within society.

If graduate education is to fulfill its stated aims, we argue that it is necessary to re-envision the enterprise itself. In addition to cultivating disciplinary and field-level expertise, graduate education could be reimagined to be power and identity-conscious to support competency related to EDI and in turn, more liberatory futures. To situate our vision more equitable and inclusive graduate education, we examine and critique the primary lenses used to study graduate education before presenting a new conceptual model, Graduate Students’ Socialization and Social Identity Construction (GSSIC).

Informed by a critical-poststructural perspective (Stewart, 2017) on ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 2005), the GSSIC centers graduate students’ diverse embodiments, identities, and experiences, and reflects the dynamic relationships between graduate students’ social identity construction, socialization to EDI, and contextual influences (e.g., institutional policy constraints, global social movements). The GSSIC leverages the strengths of campus climate, socialization, and social identity frameworks to reimagine master’s and doctoral-level education across disciplines and fields. Our model reflects the core components of ecological models of human development: (a) person, (b) process, (c) context, and (d) time (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 2005) and how they work together to produce the desired outcomes of graduate education (Gardner & Mendoza, 2010; Golde & Dore, 2001; Perez, 2016). By grounding our work in a power and identity-conscious approach, our conception of graduate education attends to individuals’ experiences and development “within context” (Swanson et al., 2003, emphasis in original).

Higher education researchers and administrators, professional association leaders, graduate faculty members, and graduate students themselves can use the GSSIC to guide more holistic and inclusive teaching, advising, and supervision; program assessment and evaluation; institutional policy development and change processes; advocacy and activism efforts; and graduate education research. In effect, we argue that reimagining graduate education can contribute to graduate students’ thriving and to more liberatory futures within and beyond higher education.

Authors

• Rosemary J. Perez, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Claire Kathleen Robbins, Virginia Tech
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cheryl L Montgomery, Virginia Tech
  Non-Presenting Author