Centering Care to Guide the Policy Pendulum: Understanding and Improving the Graduate Student Parent Experience  (Poster 22)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Sunday 1:30 p.m.
  In Poster Session: Issues in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education

Abstract

In this proposal, we—a team of graduate students, professors and administrators—share the results from our focus group evaluation study on the graduate student parent experience (conducted at an R1 in the Southeast US for The Graduate School). While highlighting our participants’ stories, insights, and recommendations, we communicate how these stories (etc.) have mattered—and are mattering—at our university. Doing so allows us to foreground the sorts of complex coordinations whereby ‘knowledge’ (e.g., research results) becomes ‘action’ (e.g., programs, resources) in higher education. Intertwining key perspectives (e.g., administrator, grad parent, researcher), we highlight ways in which the Academy has (not yet) cared for grad parent success and the care-full supports that are becoming (and still might become) policy.

Authors

• Carlson Coogler, Baylor University

• Venus Trevae Watson, University of Alabama

• April M. Jones, University of Alabama

• Sun Gu, University of Alabama

• Kelly W. Guyotte, University of Alabama

• André R. Denham, University of Alabama