This blog series features different writers responding to the prompt, “What is the future of the RD position and role?”
Guest Post by Jeremy Miller, Residence Life Professional
What is the future role of the professional called “RD”. When I look at the landscape of opportunity in front of people in my profession, I feel excitement, reservation, pride, and nervousness. All of these emotions intertwined with and inseparable from the thoughts of what our roles are, what they can be, and what I perceive they may become.
We have an opportunity to empower change agents. Students joining us are highly interested in activism and social change; we also know that students joining us do not feel confident in their ability to actually make change. It may be easy for student staff to forget the breadth and frequency of student interaction and how important their work is. Therefore our future will be decided by our capacity to help students gain confidence in their ability to influence peers and other student leaders at their place of education. Enhancing advocacy skills and helping students experience the power of their hard work begins first with understanding what our leaders value, what they want, and what they want their experience to be during and after their higher education experience.
We have the responsibility to listen and learn. It does not escape me that my students are getting younger. I certainly couldn’t be getting older. As an educator, I have valuable information to teach my students. However, consideration must be given to ideas, values, and life experiences of each new class of students and what they desire in life.. The efforts to learn from our students is a key element in crafting engaging environments that both meet our students where they are and push them to where they want to be. Yes, where THEY want to be. How can we work to put our students at the forefront of interaction and education?
We must push for the change that our students deserve. Our students come to us with a promise that we will help them transform themselves and their environment into something better. To accomplish this, we must step into several different roles. We need to be voices in spaces where our students do not fill seats at tables of power. We will need to be cheerleaders and coaches to our change agents seeking a more promising and fulfilling education experience. We especially need to fill the role of “accomplice” and “co-conspirator” in the times when those in power do not listen as they should.
We must better understand the changing expectations of engagement. Since the onset of the global devastation brought about by coronavirus, professionals in our field have had no choice but to grapple with the changing needs of their students. New waves of students every year bring unprecedented educational experiences and modes of engagement. These experiences also bring new, exciting, and sometimes confusing expectations about how we structure our engagement with them socially and pedagogically. All of our minds have been altered by the use of technology and access to information it brought with it. Add a global pandemic forcing the use of technology as a means of interaction or communication and we are forever influenced. Influenced for better or worse, to evolve in ways that fit technology’s advantages but also the ways may hurt us. If the student of today is disinterested in the modes of engagement reflecting practices of yesteryear, then what will we do to adapt and evolve?
We must be scientists. Of course I am not suggesting we teach chemistry or biology. What I am suggesting is that we must come together as a profession to propose, test, enact, assess, and refine new ideas around engagement. We must be ready to experiment with new ideas of sharing useful life information. We must be ready to try something radically different than anything we’ve done before. We must fail forward, learn from let downs, and keep trying in the name of providing good educational experiences.
We will continue to keep professional education and personal development as values of prominence while transforming our career field. None of this sounds particularly new or radical. It is more so a responsibility to reframe our efforts to align with the needs and the wants of coming students. We must look to those professionals who are telling success stories. We must consider what is being assessed and reported on concerning student engagement. We have to learn about our own campus and figure our the right methods and content to ask our students.
For the foreseeable future we will see new classes of students who have been impacted in ever more unprecedented ways by COVID. We are only beginning to understand the ramifications. Adding in an ever present bond to technology (by professionals and by their students, lets be honest) further extends the challenges we will see, but simultaneously expands the landscape of opportunity to serve our students. Let’s give them the experience they deserve. We owe it to them.
