ResEdChat Ep 81: Integrating ACUHO-I Standards Into Practice with Dr. Jeanette Zalba

Dustin Ramsdell:
Welcome back everyone to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast. Every episode we feature a variety of different topics of interest to hired professionals who work in and with university housing, residential life, residential education, whatever you might call it. But we have an interesting one today. I know I’m always sort of brainstorming new and different, interesting things to explore and the wider world of residence life with our fearless leader for the podcast, Paul Gordon Brown. So he’s well-connected, has a lot of amazing interesting folks. So he’s often kind of sourcing them for me to talk to. And I think this topic is one where I feel like I’ll learn a lot talking about ACUHO-I standards and sort of implementing them into practice and just sort of a perspective on that. We’ll just try to cover it briefly here and certainly encourage folks to continue the conversation and explore it more deeply beyond just the bounds of this episode. But we’ll start as we always do. Jeanette, if you want to introduce yourself briefly, your background, and then we’ll go from there.

Jeanette Zalba:
Well, I’m the director of Housing and Residence Life at Eastern Michigan University. I’ve been in this role for nine years. We’re a regional institution in Southeast, Michigan, and we house about 3000 students and we have about 14,000 students who attend Eastern Michigan.

Dustin Ramsdell:
You’ve been in that position for a while. I guess just to contextualize for folks too, how long have you been in residence life or just higher education at large, however you want to capture it, because we’re coming at this I think with a very 30,000 feet view, I guess building of your background and your perspective on this work.

Jeanette Zalba:
I’ve actually been in the field for 27 years and always in housing. I love student affairs, but always in housing and residence life because I just love the intensity of the work. And previous to here, I worked at SUNY Buffalo University at Buffalo for 17 years and got my master’s at Indiana and got a PhD here at Eastern Michigan University.

Dustin Ramsdell:
That’s a lot of different institutions and just a lot of commitment to this work that we’re going to be talking about today. And yeah, I wanted to make sure that I gave kudos and congratulations to you finishing your doctorate and if you just want to talk about what you worked on and just any brief reflections on the experience because I mean, it’s a major life milestone. It’s pretty awesome.

Jeanette Zalba:
Well, and I just got it in December, 2023, so I was very excited. I did my research on Black men living on campus at predominantly white institutions and their sense of belonging and things that impacted their sense of belonging, what inhibited their sense of belonging. And so that was an amazing experience. I think it taught me just my reflections. Two things. One is that I think I always turn to literature and research to give me answers, and those are very important things, but I think listening to students and hearing individual stories has also become, I think, a part of what I want to do for rest of my career because an individual story can be so impactful and it may be counter to what research is telling us in the moment because sometimes there’s also that lag. The other thing because I studied belonging that I’m cautious about is sometimes we use the word sense of belonging as a catchphrase.
Like, “Oh, we create sense of belonging. Belonging.” And I don’t think we’ve really always gotten into defining what that means for us, presenting to students appropriately. I met a lot of students who said, “I don’t know if that resonates with me. I don’t know what that word means.” And so to see it on a T-shirt, to see it on posters, I’m starting to become more critical of it. I think it exists. I think it’s an important part of a student experience. I just want us to be really intentional about using it. My little lesson for the day.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, it’s one of those zeitgeisty things where it’s just like, it could be everything or anything to people. And oftentimes, yeah, it could sort of fall flat or be kind of shallow or hollow, whatever you’d want to call it. But yeah, I think, I guess it’s sort of a brief follow up to that idea, I think that I’ve heard people sort of challenge the concepts of belonging as the sort of end all be all outcome is that it can end up having people sort of assimilate versus who I am. I find my unique identity and I feel as though I am safe and welcome in this space being my unique self versus everyone assimilating to one bland just normal, and I’m using air quotes here, version of yourself. So is that what you’re getting at?

Jeanette Zalba:
Well, yes, and interestingly enough, I think we don’t talk about safety enough, and this concept of safety, particularly for Black men, came up a lot. And so that’s a sign of that, do Black men feel safe in the world, let alone on our college campuses? Maybe, maybe not. And so their belonging is tightly coupled with a feeling of being safe. Like, “I’m not going to be victimized or I’m not going to be criminalized on this campus.” So there’s a lot to it, but indeed, I think we have to dig into it and recognize that it looks different for different students and it doesn’t need to look a certain way. It doesn’t need to look like Jeanette Zalba’s sense of belonging. So I just want us to be intentional for sure.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I mean that’s a very good insight there. And I think it definitely connects, I think to your other point of that idea of we can get now where I feel like we’re so washed in research and data and this and that, lost in the law of averages or whatever, this idea that, “Well, the average this person does this, the average…” And it’s like, sure, but then there’s a lot of people that don’t do that or whatever. So it’s like you can get so preoccupied with those notions so you can get personal narratives, and we’ve explored on the podcast here, I’m sure also related to your researchers around masculinity or whatever, you’d get these average research survey statistics that say like, “Well, the average Black man does this or that the other, or the average female student does this, that, the other.” And if you can start to, I would say, at least compliment those with the personal stories and all that. Definitely another good bit of advice and insight there.
So certainly encourage folks if they’re interested. I mean, just connect with you or find that work that you did. Yeah, yeah, it’s there. It’s there for the finding. And our topic for today, talking about ACUHO-I standard. So again, you’ve kind of been in this field doing the work in housing and residence life and residential experiences and everything for a long time. Can you discuss your experience with ACUHO-I generally and the standards specifically?

Jeanette Zalba:
When I started in the field of housing, someone introduced me to ACUHO, which is the national housing organization, actually international housing organization that supports people in this field. And I started going to conferences, kind of started looking at a lot of their foundational documents and found them as really my professional organizational home. And I think I have a very strong interest in assessment. And so someone introduced me once again to the standards. I don’t think it’s something you land on, you forget that we have standards. You might not realize we have written professional standards guiding our work, but I was introduced to it, attended something called the Professional Standards Institute, which is unfortunately no longer at this time, kind of COVID might have impacted that event.
But I attended, I learned a lot about it and really started to see the standards as a great lens for me to look at the work, use it in a variety of ways. And that was probably 20 years ago. And then at some point I was asked to become faculty for the institute. And so I spent three years teaching other people about the standards and how to use the standards in their work. So that was a really great experience.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, and I think it’s one of those things that reminds me, we’ve talked about this on the podcast as well is vision statements and mission statements and all these sort of things that departments and institutions have that can end up feeling kind of static or sort of irrelevant or just sort of like they’re up on a wall or gathering dust on the shelf and trying to find those ways to make them feel more vibrant and dynamic and relevant and active and that sort of thing. So even that idea that people maybe like, “Oh yeah, I know they have standards, but some of them feel more or less relevant or I remember looking at them, but on a while.”
So I think, yeah, it’s good that you were finding those opportunities to try to really engage with them more deeply and everything. So I think the goal of this episode, hopefully inspiring folks to find ways, to find opportunities to make these standards more applicable into their operations and their teams and everything. So we’re going to start here and maybe just clarify a couple follow-up questions, but how do you see these standards being able to inform practice or be more, again, dynamically applied into your fellow colleagues’ work?

Jeanette Zalba:
Well, one of the things I’ll say is the more and more I meet colleagues who have been in the field, we’ve sort of grown up in the field. I mean, a lot of people started as resident advisors or they lived on campus, and so they have stayed in housing. And in fact, I think housing people kind of like that. But the problem is sometimes you get a little tunneled and you sort of follow the same model you grew up under. You’re trying to recreate something that happened in the past, “Oh, I love my RA experience, so I’m going to make that same experience for my current RAs,” meaning resident advisors. And so I think what the standards will help us do is kind of step outside of ourselves. Do I think a lot of this work is intuitive? I actually do. I laugh because my own job description says I need a PhD to do it.
And I was like, “You don’t. You don’t.” You need to be really thoughtful and an intentional practitioner and do some reading. But these standards kind of allow us to step outside of what we think is good work and provide a base for what nationally, internationally other practitioners are saying makes for good work, makes for the best practice. And so I think the best implementation is to really think about where do you want your department to be if you work in housing residence life? If you supervise housing, residence life, you’re a vice president for student affairs, are you looking to improve or change your department or validate the work you’re doing, the standards might be a place to turn. And really all of the ACUHO foundational documents I think can help you do that, whether it be evaluating your own program or just thinking about, “Oh, are we doing what I think we should be doing outside of my own opinion?”
I want to say eight years ago when I started here, nine years ago, it’s the first thing we did. I pulled out those standards and introduced them to my team and said, are we doing these things? Let’s just get a baseline. I am not worried if we’re doing everything perfectly. I just want to know, are we hitting some markers that will help us think about where we want to be, where we could be? Are we doing all the things we should be doing? The other thing the standards help us do to meet, in my opinion, is to leverage with our own stakeholders on our own campus. So sometimes you have a resource you need. Sometimes you’re trying to get buy-in for a certain project, and one of my good friends says, “You’re never a prophet in your own land.” So nobody ever, “Oh, we really need this. Come on, come on.”
But maybe if you could pull those standards out and say, “Hey, the International Housing Organization says we need to do XYZ.” That can help that leveraging, that idea of getting that buy-in. So I think just introducing it to your staff, using it in evaluation, using it as a tool to step outside of yourself for best practice are the first things I’d say to help implement, pull this thing out. And by the way, I was just on the ACUHO site and it’s there. You don’t have to be a member to see it. So anyone can pull that document up and look at it and review it and introduce it to their staff.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I like that… I mean, you’re just going to mention a good couple of different applications. Because I know for me, a really big one, kind of an organizational development front is the idea of when you’re evaluating the performance of team members, it’s like, “Well, we want to make sure that you’re working towards these different standards in your day-to-day work.” And certainly I think you mentioned just high level to level set where we are, where we want to get to, those can be the helpful benchmarks. And then just for trying to advocate for resources like, “Hey, we’re really not measuring up to where we should be,” and getting those resources. It’s so many different facets, but all sort of equally important in their own ways. And in my mind I was like, “Yeah, and I think it could add to credibility.” And then it’s like, “Well, I mean students don’t really know what these are so it’s not going to be credibility there.”
But even just like you were saying, validating it to your colleagues at your own institution, and then even if you’re trying to recruit, you could really show like, hey, well, this is what our team is doing aligned with these standards and where we’d like to go and all that. If somebody wants to come work at a particular institution, I’m sure really hope so that that would really resonate to see, hey, we’re kind really integrating these and showing our work and making it very clear that these are important standards that we hold ourselves to versus kind of that idea that everybody probably be like, “Yeah, okay, yeah, these standards are important.” It’s just sort of lip service, but showing, “Here at our institution,” and really making it very explicitly clear.

Jeanette Zalba:
Well, and I joke, I mean, I say, you don’t need a PhD to do this work because you don’t, and I don’t want to be flipping that this is a profession, and sometimes we have to convince our other stakeholders on our campus that we are doing work intentionally. We are doing work with an academic lens. We don’t just make stuff up. Occasionally we do, but I know during COVID, we were asked to do a lot of things and I had to remind people of what we’re not doing. And so I think all these foundational documents help us say we are a profession. We are trained, we follow professional standards, and we deserve respect. Now, I feel very fortunate that we do get respect on my campus, but it is because of we present those things. We’re not just making it up. But do I think with a lot of experience, like I said, reading, paying attention to what’s happening nationally, internationally, people do sometimes make things up. Sure, but it comes vetted. It comes with experience for me.

Dustin Ramsdell:
That’s always been my perspective though, is if you’re well-read, if you sort of a really kind of smart about it, the idea is like, yeah, we don’t have to all be standards robots, but if it’s all sort of blending together to inform your perspective, it’s like, yeah, I think especially people in housing residence life are probably good improvisers in the sense of you’ve got to think of your toes and respond to what’s happening at your campus with that particular student and whatever else. But knowing that it is informed with everything blended together of whatever training and education you have and knowing the standards and everything, but then it’s like, especially when you’re writing things down or have that opportunity to be trying to showcase yourself in the best light and advocate for things, it’s like it should feel very easy or a important requirement to bring these in because it just gives respect to really the power of what folks on campuses in these departments are doing.
Because without it it’s like, yeah, it would just feel a little bit more fragile. People could kind of poke holes in it. It’s like, “Well, what are you basing all this on?” It’s just like, “Well, again, yeah, that idea, well, everything is improvised, but trust me, I am well-trained and all that.” So I think, yeah, it’s something that I feel like is happening a little bit more as just higher ed is in this period of transition and change and all that is trying to find these bedrock foundational things that you hold onto as sort standards in a time when I would say certainly in housing residence life, it’s like we’re seeing campuses become more digitally transformed and hybrid and all that. So, how do we make sure that we don’t lose sight, I guess, of what we know are these high impact practices and the outcomes that are able to be achieved through residential experience? Well, with all of that, I think we’ve talked about why this is important and some examples of how to do it. What advice would you give to leaders looking to integrate them?

Jeanette Zalba:
Well, I think first go get yourself a copy, and I did just hear from ACUHO that there’s a self-assessment guide, which is a complimentary document, which is not currently on the ACUHO website, but will be. And that is actually a really, I want to say simple, but maybe that’s not the best way to explain it, but they take all of the standards, which are done in bullet points. So the nice thing is when you read this document, it’s a pretty quick read. So I would say get the document, get the self-assessment guide and being told they’ll be put up shortly and start looking at that document and introducing it to your team. I would also say there’s two parts of the document that I think could be integrated right away. There’s an ethics section and an ethical hiring practices section. Those to me are, you could implement them right away.
You could bring them to your team and say, “Hey, I want us to do this. Let’s review this. Let’s make sure we’re already doing this.” Relatively easy. They could be used as is. You could copy them and put them, sorry, copyright, I don’t know, but they could be used in your manuals as best practices when we talk about ethics and hiring. So don’t recreate the wheel, go grab something, borrow something from this organization who’s taken the time. Back to these self-assessment guides though, is they cover every piece of the standards. But I also think sometimes people get overwhelmed. They get overwhelmed by assessment. They’re going to see the document say, “Wow, this is a lot.” Maybe you just take one section. You could take residential facilities, student learning and development as a section and just do that self-assessment for that one section and really think about, “Are we doing these things?”
The other additional I’ll say with that is don’t do it alone. So do it with your team. Do it with stakeholders because they’re the ones who are really going to be honest and truthful, but also they’re the ones who are going to make that change and get the buy-in if you want the team to make a change. So you could, as a director, as an assistant director, associate director, fill out the self-assessment guide yourself, “Oh, this is what we did. We’re compliant here. We’re not compliant there.” But really make it a team experience, not a gotcha experience, but instead, sort of an improvement experience to review with the team and say, “Hey, are we doing these things? I’m going to ask the residence life side of the house to look at this section this summer.”
And those self-assessment guides once they come out are really easy to use. They actually just take each item, each bullet, and you just score them. Are we partially compliant? Fully compliant? And then it gives you some reflection time to say, “Well, what do we want to do about this?” Since they’re all guidelines, even ACUHO doesn’t say you have to follow every single thing, but maybe there’s one thing that you say, “Wow, this really illuminates something we want to work on,” but just read it, share it with your staff. Do the self-assessment guides, use those ethical pieces. It’s actually a very easy accessible document, I think.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, it’s good resources and advice there because I think, yeah, it’s just that little nudge and I think you just build some momentum with this and seeing how it could be helpful. And I would think people are imagining exactly what you’re saying. It’s like, “Well, I don’t want to feel like it’s like a gotcha kind thing or that I’m sort of creating delinquency around,” whatever. Creating a culture where we feel like we’re getting, I don’t know, that idea of you do that assessment and if you’re like, “Oh my gosh, look how much room we have to… These gaps we have to close,” or whatever, but it’s like one person’s challenge is another person’s opportunity, I think. And having this sort structure to know sort of how you can keep having continuous improvement, sort of iterate on things. You’re not of resting on your laurels or just making assumptions about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and all that.
So I think a shorter episode, we could probably talk about this for a very long time, but I wanted to give this sort of brief episode and acknowledgement of hopefully having folks rethink as they’re heading into a new academic year, how they can start reassessing the work that they’re doing on a day-to-day basis with their team. So I’ll definitely link out to what you’d mentioned in the show notes so folks can go check it out and hopefully folks will also reach out to keep the conversation going with you. And we do that in the description for the episode. But thanks so much for hanging out and just giving a brief little window into how to better integrate ACUHO-I standards in the work. And maybe we’ll have you back some point in the future to do… Because I feel like this is the one-on-one episode. We’ll do two-on-ones some point in the future to keep this going. So I think it’s always a important and timely conversation to have.

Jeanette Zalba:
Yeah, thanks Dustin for having it.