On this episode of ResEdChat, join our host Noah Montague and guest Jess Castaneda, Resident Director at Tulane University, as they talk about critically conscious supervision of graduate assistants of color in Residence Life. Graduate Assistants or GAs are the future of our far-from-perfect field. Systemic inequities exist within higher education that are crucial to unpack, dismantle, and reflect on. GAs are uniquely situated between student and staff, thus meaning that GAs of color can and do experience those same systems in more than one context. Thus, this makes the duty of full-time staff members in residence life to practice this form of supervision to properly support them. Thus, in this episode, Jess and Noah explore the concept of Critically Conscious Supervision, share impactful stories, and provide practical advice to Residence Life Staff.
Guest: Jess Castaneda (They/Them/Theirs), Resident Director, Tulane University
Host: Noah Montague
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Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. If you have a topic idea for an episode, let us know!
Transcript:
Noah Montague:
Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast, a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in Residence Life and college student housing.
So my name is Noah Montague, and I use he/him/his pronouns, and today, I’m going to be your host. As y’all know by now, if you’ve been watching my episodes a bit, I like to say that I’m a storyteller by trade, and the stories that I choose to tell are those that focus on college students and the college student experience, which truly makes me all the more excited about today’s topic.
So today, we are going to be talking about critically-conscious supervision and what that means when supporting graduate assistants of color. So graduate assistants are the future of our far-from-perfect field in more ways than one when I say that. Systemic inequities exist within higher education that are crucial to unpack, dismantle, and reflect on in our work. While we often focus on making the college experience a more inclusive one for undergraduate students, it is also crucial that we think about and look at our graduate students, especially those that exist within both of the systems that we’re talking about, in our offices and in the classroom, and what that looks like in their work as we are working with them, as, again, they are the future of our field. So GAs in that capacity are uniquely situated between student and staff, thus meaning that GAs of color can and do experience those same systems in both of those contexts. Thus, this makes it the duty of full-time staff members in Residence Life to practice this form of supervision to properly support them.
So today’s guest, in that capacity, is a friend and a colleague that actually recently graduated with our master’s program, so I’m so excited to get to talk to them and introduce them to you all today. I first met this individual at Miami University, where I currently work, but now they’re off living their life elsewhere, and it’s a privilege I get to call them my friend. So I’m going to go ahead and let them introduce themselves today.
Jess Castaneda:
Hi, I’m Jess Castaneda, I use they/them pronouns. I’m a first-time full-time resident director at Tulane University down in New Orleans, Louisiana. Super excited to be here and talk to you today about this, Noah, you know this is my favorite topic to talk about and how to support grad students better in their introduction into the field.
Noah Montague:
Definitely. I’m so excited to have you here as well, as I’ve said a couple of times, both on and off-camera, but truly, thank you for being here. I guess then to begin in laying the groundwork for our conversation today, I know I talked a little bit about critical consciousness in my introduction, but I think it’s important that whenever we’re talking about a larger topic, that maybe not everyone is familiar with the specific language, that we give some kind of definition. So with that groundwork, what do you think that it means to be a critically-conscious supervisor?
Jess Castaneda:
Yeah. I think taking that down a little bit more into critical consciousness versus critically-conscious supervision, I think critical consciousness is essentially foundationally bare minimum. It’s about being open to different perspectives and different lived experiences, and being curious about them, wanting to understand the way the world interacts with others who don’t inherently have the same social identities as oneself. And within supervision, I think that’s a really big thing, thinking about Residence Life and supervising graduate assistants, I think it’s really important to think about the identities of those grad students and how not only the world around them, but how the field interacts with those social identities. How do students perceive them? How do other staff members perceive them? How do faculty members perceive them? I think those are really important, because it is essentially the way student affairs or even Residence Life… Oh gosh, now I’m having a brain fart. How all of those things interconnectedly… Is that a word? I think it’s a word.
Noah Montague:
That’s a word.
Jess Castaneda:
And I think that inherently impacts the way that those graduate students perceive the field and do their work and interact with the world around them. And I think as a supervisor, being a critically-conscious supervisor is… Student development theory 101, Learning Partnership Model, back of a tandem bike. I think that when you think about that, I think about this all the time, I know we’ve talked about this off-camera, but thinking about the Learning Partnership Model being on the back of that tandem bicycle.
Typically, it’s me as the student affairs practitioner and the undergraduate students I serve in the front seat kind of thing. When you take it in a supervision and graduate student perspective, I think critical consciousness looks like guiding them on the path, but also demystifying the world. Thinking about the way gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, all of those things will impact the course that this tandem bicycle is on, I think that is one of the ways I really think about critically-conscious supervision. You’re talking about the road in front of you, the barriers, and helping these young professionals understand how to work through them and how to become change-makers within their own field, within their own practice.
Noah Montague:
Yeah, I completely agree with you, and I love that you brought in Learning Partnership Model and the tandem bicycle, I think about that a lot in this space. And I also think that when me, thinking about my own experience and my own identities when it comes to being a critically-conscious supervisor, I’m a white man, and I think that that is an important context in that space as well, in that the whole process of being a critically-conscious supervisor to me, and thinking about this being critically-conscious in general, is being open to other perspectives and other ideas and other experiences other than your own. And as a supervisor of grad students over time, if I’m not reflecting on my own identities and my own experiences and how they show up, then I can’t possibly do that alongside students that I’m supporting, especially if these graduate students I’m working with are coming in with marginalized identities that differ from my own.
So as far as a tandem bicycle, and I love that analogy here, because I almost think about it like how a typical tandem bike works with the student in the front, in the theory of Learning Partnership Model, student in the front, and supervisor/RD/staff member in the back. I almost wonder what it can look like to push it even further and be alongside in that capacity, because something for me with supervising grad students, especially in talking about different levels of oppression and marginalization, helping someone see that they can and that they are at an even level, like, yes, I’m your supervisor, but we’re doing this together, we are equal in decision-making, we are figuring this out alongside each other, and I think that that is something I’m thinking about in this moment in response to what you just said as well.
Jess Castaneda:
I would argue that not all supervisors perceive supervision of grad students as we’re equal in decision-making though.
Noah Montague:
And I’d agree with you, and I think that is part of what I think we’re going to talk about today as well, because that is important to me in my work as a supervisor. I’m at my fifth grad student now? Yeah, I’m at my fifth grad student now, which is wild to think about. But I think we already started talking about my next question a little bit, and I want to go a little deeper into it, but how do you think that race and power show up in the supervisor to graduate assistant relationship? We’ve kind of started talking about it, but I want to get a little bit deeper into that conversation.
Jess Castaneda:
Yeah, I think… Well, let me start with power first. I think power inherently, one person’s got a master’s degree and the other one doesn’t, or is in process, so that’s one of the big things. But also, even within position, resident director, residence hall coordinator, whatever the position may be, versus grad student, I think that power also shows up differently between those two positions because of the time that we spend. When I was a grad student, I had significantly less time with my RAs or my residents compared to a full-time RD, so then… Gosh, every time, I’d be confused as a head RA or an RA, I still get confused with that now, but I think traditional supervisory, I guess the way it looks essentially, is RD, grad, RAs. I think a better power structure, or supervisory structure, is RD and grad and then RAs, but not everybody runs their ship that way, so I think that’s important to say as well.
But I think that when it comes to race, showing up in the supervisor to grad assistant relationship, I think that’s a really big thing, because I’ve had two supervisors in my time in Res Life out of four that were people of color. And I think even not being the same race or nationality, I think that I gathered so much more connection and camaraderie with them, because they got it, they understood even a little bit of the things that I had experienced in the field, working with students, working with other staff members, working with student staff members. So I think that that’s a really big thing.
But also, higher education is not accessible to everybody, so you’re more likely to get a white supervisor versus a supervisor of color, and so how do we… I think later, we’ll talk more about what does it look like to be a white supervisor supervising grad students of color, and how do we utilize the things that we’re talking about today in more tangible ways. I think that when it comes to race within this supervisory relationship, without that critical consciousness, I think it can be really harmful. I’ve found that a lot of professionals have this don’t-fix-what-ain’t-broken perspective, when really, we should be thinking more future-forward.
We should be ready for new and different professionals with different perspectives and identities to be into the field, and how are we taking their ideas, their perspectives, their lived experiences, and how are we utilizing that to inform our practices, not only with grad students, but also with our student staff members, our RAs, our desk staff members, because these are things that also impact them as well. And because we’re no longer in graduate courses or undergraduate courses, we may be missing out on these really key topics and ideas and identities within our own practice. This is just my personal opinion, I think the further that we are into the field and away from the classroom, I think that we need to be thinking a lot more about this critical consciousness. We need to stay up to date with the work that we do, the students that we’re serving.
Noah Montague:
No, I completely, completely agree, especially with the portion that you said at the end with the further we move from the classroom, the more thinking about this is important, and being that theory to practice-centered mindset within this work can get really hard the further you get from the classroom, so I think that that is such an important point to think about. I love that you started with power and then went into race as well and what that looks like. But power, I completely agree with you across the systems that we have in place create a power structure that exists, and that is part of, I think, again, what we’re talking about today, is navigating these structures and what that looks like for students of different identities, and particularly for those graduate students.
But I think that something that I have been reflecting a lot about, again, thinking about my own identities and the way that I perceive and enter into this work, is being honest about the systems that we’re in and the situations that we’re in and what things might look like, and that, I think, is an important conversation to have in more ways than one, especially when we’re talking about, okay, I’m a white supervisor potentially supervising a grad student of color, I want to have an honest conversation about what that might look like and what the realities of that are going to be.
Last year, my graduate assistant was a Black woman from Africa, and we had several different conversations throughout the year of it is very, very important to me, me being Noah, that your RAs go to you and they don’t come to me, they don’t lean into that space of, okay, let me go to what I perceive as the leader, let me go to the person with a master’s degree. I’m like, “No, I want them to talk to you, you are in charge of them, and that is something that I imagine might be something that comes up this year.” And we had a very honest conversation about it, and she later told me how important that was that we talked about it at the beginning of the year.
And that is something that I have worked to lean into a lot, and that shows up in power and race in these systems and what supervision can look like and what that relationship is, because I think that had we not had a conversation about power at the beginning of our year, I think that I would’ve been doing her a disservice, her students a disservice and myself a disservice as we head into the year in and of itself. And now she’s starting her PhD program and it’s going so well already, she sent me what she’s working on, and I’m just so, so, so proud of her.
Jess Castaneda:
She’s awesome.
Noah Montague:
She’s so cool.
Jess Castaneda:
I think also, with this question, when you were talking about your last GA, I was thinking about the work that I’ve done with my RAs this past year. This is the first time… I’ve always co-supervised, for the most part, except for like two or three months when I was in grad school, but I’ve always co-supervised a staff of 11 with a full-time RD. This is my first time supervising solo, and I got 14, and at first, that was like, whoa, how do I do this by myself, whoa, what? But eventually, I got into it and it was awesome, it is awesome.
But I think a lot about power within that structure as well, I think it’s really similar to the RD and graduate assistant dynamic. I also think of it in a professional development way for my student and staff members. For a lot of them, this is probably their first or second job, and so I think that I need to do my due diligence and demystify supervisory practices for them. So we talk a lot about how do you provide feedback to a supervisor, how do we normalize feedback, and explaining… I get into yapping with them about these things, but I sit there and I’m like, “Listen, this will benefit you after you graduate and you do your big adult things in life.” This is pretty foundational professional development that I really want them to understand, because I don’t want them working in their professional roles and just not understanding how to navigate these difficult political spaces in their offices, in their professional fields.
I recently talked to them about social capital and what that means, first within an RA perspective, within the department, within the division, but also, what does that look like in a professional sense? What does it mean to have social capital, how do you build that up, and what does it mean when you have it? And it sounds super messed up, but when you think about all these different fields, a lot of them function in a very bureaucratic environment, very top-down-heavy, and I think that’s also very similar to the supervisor to GA dynamic, top-down leadership, supervisoryship and management.
Noah Montague:
Yeah, I totally agree with you too. Going into our next question though, I think that you transitioned us pretty well in talking about leadership and supervision so far, but have you ever been supervised in a way that made you feel truly seen and supported in your full identity, and maybe what did that look like for you?
Jess Castaneda:
Oh gosh. You’re going to make me start crying. I’m going to talk about my favorite person in this field and in my life, my supervisor my second year of grad school, Carter, I love her, she’s awesome and amazing. I remember I came back from an internship that summer having a significantly better understanding of good supervision, and I think that when I started working with Carter, out the jump, it was amazing. I remember one of the first one-on-one training conversations I had with her was like, “I really…” Am I allowed to say a specific housing software on this, or…
Noah Montague:
Yeah.
Jess Castaneda:
Okay. Because at Miami, we used StarRez, and I was like, “I really want to learn how to use StarRez. I want to learn how to pull occupancy graphs, I want to learn how to do room changes on there.” And she was like, “Awesome, let’s do it.” You were there, but you were not there. This past weekend, I went to Miami, I was visiting for your birthday actually, and I was talking with Carter, and she was talking about that conversation and how I was really ready to just learn the things, and I think that Carter really helped me feel more confident and empowered to do new and different things in this work.
That year, in our building, I made a roster for our building community. It had a… Gosh, it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever made. I do it this year too here at Tulane. It keeps track of the one-on-ones RAs have with their residents, it keeps track of their budget, their admin tasks, it has all of their students’ information on there, their corridor, birthdays, ages. It also had important info on whether or not the student was a student athlete, an international student. And she was so on board with me doing that and letting me execute that and figuring out the kinks of it and what information to add, what information to delete. She was super on board with all of the random rambunctious ideas that I had, and I think that that support made me so much better as a professional.
In my building with Carter, that was the first time… So my first year in grad school, you know this, I started the Free Store, so a mutual aid initiative where students can donate things they no longer wanted or needed and take things as they wanted or needed. My first year in grad school, I started it, it was good, it was good. But when I was with Carter, she gave me funding for it. I was able to get a really nice shelf to hold things up on there. I was able to get some basic hygiene supplies, toothpaste, toothbrushes, deodorant, all these different things. I was able to get funding to get flyers printed out and posted all throughout the building. And so, the way that she not only let me learn things and teach me things, but the way she supported my different ideas and gave me the resources to be able to launch them was one of the most amazing things ever.
And so, now I’m at Tulane as a full-time professional, I’m putting on the Free Store again in both of my buildings and using some of my funding to get some of those things as well. And so, I think without Carter, I wouldn’t feel as empowered to try different things in my job and in the work that I do with students. She let me lead our staff meetings every week. Even that small bit of being in that position of, “Oh, Jess is leading the staff meeting, Jess is our grad, but they do X, Y and Z,” it didn’t feel like I was a grad student.
Carter, every single time she’s ever introduced me to somebody, whether it be at a conference or around the institution, she would introduce me as her colleague, and something that small meant so much to me, because for the first half of my graduate school experience, I’ve always used, “Oh, I’m just a grad GA, I’m just a GA, I’m just a grad student.” But to Carter, I was a colleague, I was on par with her, she saw me as a professional, she saw me as capable. And I think that, gosh, I miss Carter so much. I’ve loved working with her, she’s amazing. Gosh, I’m so jealous of every grad that comes after me.
Noah Montague:
You were trusted, you were listened to, your opinions were valued, and so much of what I’m hearing in your answer is that she believed in you and what you could do in the work and how much those little things of, “This is my colleague, Jess,” rather than, “This is my grad student,” and what that meant to you in those spaces.
I think for me, in my role, in thinking about this question, I have been very privileged to have great supervisors in my life, and I’ve worked to give that back to the folks that I’m working with, which I think is more pertinent within this conversation in what I’ve done as a supervisor in those conversations and with the grad students that I’ve had. Again, thinking about my most recent experience supervising a grad last year and really getting into that work, I remember distinctly the first time that I realized that this human trusted me, and it was such… I’m going to cry if we really get into it, thinking about the emotions in that space.
But she came to me one day and said, “Hey, I know that you have expressed willingness to talk about queerness and working with students and what that looks like, and this is an area that I feel like I need to do better in. You’ve expressed being willing to talk about it. Can we talk about it and make a plan so that I can do better in this area?” And I think that that was such a huge deal for me as a supervisor, because I’m like, okay, this is a person who trusts me enough to ask for advice in an identity-related conversation, but also thinking about her own space and her own identities. And to tell a supervisor that you feel like you are not good at something and not be worried about that impacting you, that was the moment that I realized I had been doing my job in listening and building that trust and doing some of the things you talked about with Carter. No, this is my colleague, this is a person that I work with, we work together to make this happen.
And one of the biggest things that her and I talked about throughout the year was, “You don’t have to ask me before you make a decision.” And that was an important thing, both in thinking about critical consciousness and the ways in which I know that historically she did not feel trusted within the systems that we were in to just make decisions, and she would come to me with exactly what I would’ve told her to do, and I’m like, “Yeah, do that. That’s what we need to do, exactly that thing.” And that little bit of extra push for me to do it proved to be helpful in those spaces as well. “I actually think that is exactly what we should do,” moving that bicycle back side by side again, “that is what I think we should do, let’s try that and see how it goes.” And I found that to be really meaningful, to the point where she decided she trusted me enough to say she wasn’t good at something, and that was a big deal for me. And I think about that all the time as we get into this conversation too.
Jess Castaneda:
Yeah. I think it’s really hard for, at least speaking for myself, I think it was really hard for me to say, “I don’t know how to do this, I need help.” Because thinking about who I am and my identities, I’m a queer, Brown person, I’m Filipino and all these things, and so I’m already seen as inadequate, and saying, “I need help with something” shows others that, oh, maybe I don’t got it like that, maybe I need 10,000 times more support than I actually do, or I am inadequate in this, or I don’t understand the basic foundational things of the work that I do. I think that that’s something that went through my brain a lot my first year of grad school. I would ask help from other people I trusted, like you, I would ask for a lot of help from my faculty members in trying to understand some things, and I think it’s hard. And I think it’s super cool that you’re talking about how you gave your grad, you gave them agency back, and it sounds like you gave them the confidence to do really good work.
Noah Montague:
That was the goal, and I think that that really is the goal when we get into the advice portion of this conversation, that I want to make sure that we have, that I hope folks will hear from us today, is the sheer importance of providing space, listening, confidence, to the folks that we’re supervising, because if we’re not doing that, what are we actually doing? It makes me mad when I hear these experiences of negative supervision in relationships. Anyhoo. Getting a little bit more into the systemic side of things, what’s maybe one thing that you think the systems that we live and operate in, how do systems need to evolve in order to better support graduate assistants of color?
Jess Castaneda:
I think that answering this question in the context of systems can be quite difficult, considering different state legislation that’s happening right now, and even thinking about… I could say doing more training, but in some states, doing that training is now illegal. So I think that to make it a little bit more accessible to other listeners who are in states where other trainings or conversations aren’t able to happen, I think it’s about thinking about how individual perspectives or individual change-making can happen.
I think about our department, and we had, what, 14 grad students at one point, and thinking about other RDs and how other RDs were friends with each other, other grad students, I think tapping into those relationships, hearing about the experiences of other grads in the department. I’m trying to think about this. How do you shoulder tap colleagues in being like, “Hey, maybe you need to fix something,” without just throwing their grads’ business out there like that? I think this is a really complicated question to answer. I think about my experience and how, as a queer grad student, I would get misgendered all the time in department meetings with 30, 40 people in the room, and that was just like, oh, good morning. So I don’t know. What would your answer be? Maybe I can think of something.
Noah Montague:
I think that your point about systems makes this question more complicated, in that so many systems are changing so rapidly right now, depending on state to state, depending on… Even in my state where I’m currently at, we’re watching schools react differently to bills and things happening, and on top of that, we’re watching faculty and staff react differently to the reactions of those things, and it’s all complicated in that capacity. So maybe systems isn’t the most helpful thing in that space.
But rather I love your answer thinking about person to person, but almost to me, in what we’ve talked about so far, it feels like a culture change is so heavily what is necessary, and you talking about shoulder tapping other folks and having that conversation. My current department, we have less and less grads at the moment, and those grads that we do have, most of them are supervised by full-time staff, and that also isn’t the case across the board. And for the most part, the development and growth and supervision of each individual grad is kind of on one person rather than helping each other to help the folks in our field, and that is something that I think happens…
Colleague to colleague, like me and the individuals that are not grad students that I connect with, I’m like, “Oh, I think this person would be better to help you with that question,” I’ll do that happily. And I think there’s an interesting mindset of I have to be the one to support my grad student through whatever they bring to me, whether it be something that should come to me or maybe someone else would be better suited for it. But with the folks that I work with one-on-one that are “at the same level,” have that master’s degree, I don’t know that that is a thing that folks in my department are as hesitant about, to be like, “Oh yeah, we’re all here to help.”
But with grad students, the thing feels like, go to your supervisor, that’s the answer to the question every time. So I think that if I had to name something that I think needs to evolve, could look different culturally or systemically at my school, that’s something that comes to mind, is if we’re talking about continued support and we’re willing to send a student to another office when they need to talk to someone in a different space, but we don’t do that with grad students in the same way, and I think that is something that’s coming to mind in this moment.
Jess Castaneda:
Yeah. I think you bring up a really good point. I think communal care within a department for grad students is so key. Thinking about our department at Miami, during my time in grad school, we had a person on pro staff who has a law degree, and for grad students who are interested in going into Title IX, I think that would’ve been a really cool connection to make, to talk about that functional area in student affairs. I think that it’s really interesting to hear these conversations about Residence Life working in silos and whatnot, we’re a department that just functions on our own kind of thing. But even when you look at Residence Life in and of itself, buildings themselves are siloed and thinking about the grad students that are in there…
I think that if I didn’t connect with you my first year in grad school, I think I would’ve been like, “Oh, this is what the field is like? I think I should leave.” And I almost did, until I got with Carter, and and Carter showed me a whole different side of student affairs and Residence Life, and I think that… A little bit of context, Tulane’s a private school, we have about 5,000 on-campus students and about 12 RDs and two grad students. Well, two grad students that work in housing. We have two other grad students that work with other administrative tasks within the department. The two grad students that we have aren’t in student affairs at all. And so, even thinking about Miami, we had a couple of grad students who weren’t within student affairs, but I think that it takes a really similar perspective in the, how are we connecting these grad students with other RDs who have different experiences within the field and can mentor and train in different ways, that they’re not just latched onto their supervisor the entire year?
Noah Montague:
Because to silo care and support and development in that way negates the community support and care that should be offered to graduate students and the way that we offer it to students, because undergraduate students have so many offices and places they can go, and that just isn’t as present and actively talked about. Or even in my own experience, I honestly think that if I, in the past, was not able to help some of my first grad students with an issue that came up, I would feel like I failed if I sent them to somebody else. And now, I know that that isn’t the case, having worked with other students and been able to direct my GAs to other offices, to other people, and just through happenstance, having a lot of second-year graduate assistants that have a previous experience already. I don’t know, I just think that’s really interesting.
But for the sake of time and getting into our last bit of conversation, we have talked about this next question a little bit, so I’m going to also ask about some tangible advice that you might give to those listening. But what do you think is the role of white supervisors or those with privileged identities in this work? And maybe what’s a piece of tangible advice you would give to new supervisors in general as they start this journey of becoming more critically-conscious in their supervision?
Jess Castaneda:
I think that the role of white supervisors or folks with more privileged identities within the work of supervising grad students of color is you’ve got to come curious, you’ve got to gather some form of understanding. I think a lot about dissonance and how we all come from years of our own lived experiences, some things you’ve seen as true or consider true, and then you see something that’s the exact opposite or something that challenges your truth. I think that dissonance is one of the biggest things that I experienced from my supervisor my first year of grad school. Being an Asian femme, I’m non-binary, but I’m very feminine-presenting, I think one of the big things was, oh, snap, Jess talks a lot and they’re very loud and very adamant and have a lot of ideas and want to do things, and I think that dissonance was one of the really big points of conflict.
I think that when it comes to supervisors with more privileged identities working with supervisees, I think it’s important to understand where the supervisee is coming from, where are they at, where do they want to go, and what is your role in helping them get there? It’s not just, oh, we’re running this building together for a year, we’re going to make sure these students are chilling, they’re coming out safe, they’re doing their jobs. This job is not that. That is the bare minimum. I think that-
Noah Montague:
The bare minimum.
Jess Castaneda:
Exceptionally bare minimum. There’s so many moments of growth for everybody, all of the in-hall staff, all of the residents, all of the colleagues that you work with within your departments, and I think that you have to consistently think about what’s your role in that. How are you impacting other people around you? And I think when supervising grad students, is this the way you want them to be introduced into the field? Is this the way you want them to perceive Residence Life, student affairs? I think most grad students within student affairs go into the field because they loved the student affairs practitioners that came before them. That’s very different from the RAs that we supervise, they either become RAs because they love the work that their previous RA did, they do it for the benefits, or because their RA sucked. And I don’t think people come into student affairs for the benefits, if we’re being honest.
Noah Montague:
No, if we’re being honest.
Jess Castaneda:
I think it’s the work that drives practitioners into this field. And I think that people need to think about their practice and whether or not they want that replicated by the people that they supervise. Do they feel confident that the work that they do will impact generations after them?
Noah Montague:
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know that I could say that better, but I’m going to continue with a little bit of that, because you said a lot of what I’m thinking about both of these questions. I’ve talked a bit about what I think my role is, being a white supervisor and overseeing both undergraduate students of color, graduate students of color, my current RA staff is majority students of color, and I think that they’re, to the point that I made, I think there is so much importance in being honest with the people that you’re working with.
And I know that I’ve made that point before, but I think about it so much in this work, because I think that student affairs needs to be a more honest field in general, as we’re entering it and thinking about, to your own point, folks are entering graduate programs because they either loved a mentor and experience or they hated a mentor and experience, the same as RAs going into this work. I have colleagues who entered student affairs because they want to make it better, because they had a bad experience, and because they want to keep it going in the way that they had.
And I think that being critically-conscious is so unbelievably important in this work, because if we are not reflecting on who we are, what we’re bringing to our graduate students, what we’re bringing to our students, why are people going to continue in this field, number one? And number two, we’d be failing, and I’m disinterested in failing the people that I work with in every facet of my being and the students that I work with. So I think that listening, providing that support, and asking the questions around, “What do you actually need from me? What do you want this relationship to look like between full-time staff member and graduate assistant?” I’m not assuming that every grad you have is going to need the same things, behave the same way, have the same experiences or identities. Entering grad student number five, all of my grads have been wildly different and have needed vastly different things and wanted a vastly different relationship.
Last year, my relationship with my grad student, we talked about identity every single week, and a previous grad didn’t want to reflect on anything, and I had to meet them in that. Even though that hurt my student affairs heart to be like, “Okay, we won’t reflect, we won’t talk about anything,” but that’s what they needed from me. So I think that separating myself with that student and centering the actual experience of the grad students that I’m working with is both my answer to what is the role of white supervisors or those with privileged identities and tangible advice that I would give. It is not about me, and I also have to do my own work to make it about the person I’m working with, if that makes sense.
I think that that just about wraps us up then and everything that I wanted to share. Thank you so much, Jess, for joining me today. That wraps up our time together. I hope you had fun.
Jess Castaneda:
So much fun.
Noah Montague:
We talked about some cool stuff. And thank you all for joining us on this episode of ResEdChat. If you have an idea for a topic or a person that you would like us to have on the show, please let us know by reaching out to Roompact, and as always, keep taking care of each other. Bye for now.
