Winter 2023 Stories

By Ezinne D. Ofoegbu

Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership
School of Education and Counseling Psychology

As a higher education scholar-practitioner, I often ask myself, “What impact do I want my work to have?” There are several ways I can answer this question, and my favorite approach is to reflect on collegiate history. In 2023, most institutions recognize that they occupy land that was stolen from Native and Indigenous people. Some institutions, particularly in southern states, acknowledge their historical connections to the enslavement of African people (e.g., slave labor, engaging in the slave trade). Even at SCU, the Mission Church serves as a forever symbol of our campus’ connection to Indigenous people and Spanish colonization. All this history is directly tied to contemporary issues in higher education, particularly issues of college access for students of color, first-generation students, low-income students, and the mistreatment of students, staff, and faculty of color at historically white institutions. Nonetheless, the Jesuit’s relationship to social justice and reflection is one that stays with me as a teacher-scholar and as a human being who navigates multiple forms of marginalization myself. Because of our history and the tensions that exist within this history, I think SCU’s connection to the Catholic intellectual tradition (CIT) is even more significant.

So, I return to this question: “What impact do I want my work to have?” My work is rooted in this history, namely the fact that many universities were built with the intent to exclude people who look like me, and these spaces continue to be hostile, unsupportive environments for Black people and other people of color. My scholarship, which is rooted in my orientation as a social justice–minded scholar, unapologetically examines the lives of students like me: students who look like me, students who share a similar background or identity as me, students who attend colleges and universities that were built to exclude them. My teaching practice serves the purpose of preparing scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to serve diverse communities of students and advancing social justice in higher education. As such, this work is inherently informed by the Jesuit values as I understand them.

There are several Jesuit values and traditions that very much resonate with me and how I approach my teaching and relationships with my students. For example, in the article titled The Intersection of Race, Class, and Gender in Jesuit and Feminist Education: Finding Transcendent Meaning in the Concrete by M. Shawn Copeland, Copeland explored the intersections of Jesuit and feminist pedagogy. Copeland wrote that Jesuit and feminist pedagogy must do the following things: 1) Do more than reproduce students who will sustain current cultural contexts 2) Address the presence and persistence of racism (other isms) in society and educational contexts 3) Foster critical analysis of white privilege. These are pedagogical techniques I attempt to model in my classroom. I teach teachers, education practitioners, and leaders who are tasked with leading and supporting the most diverse populations of students in K–12 and higher education settings. In my college student development theory course, for example, I ask students to reflect on their positionalities and how these positionalities inform how they see the world and support students. I ask them to reflect on their positionalities often—as they engage in class discussion, as they complete case studies, as they complete course assignments, etc. Creating space for students to grapple with their own experiences of oppression as well as privilege is necessary to acknowledge it and work against these larger structures of social and systemic injustice. This self-work guides the development of strategies to support students with similar positionalities, as well as students whose educational institutions were built to intentionally exclude. To echo Copeland, a Jesuit university is the place where such questions and reflection should take place. As members of the SCU community, we have a responsibility to ask and attempt to answer critical questions that impact our lives, the lives of our students and communities, and society. I say all this to say, Jesuit pedagogy requires an acknowledgement of intersecting forms of privilege and oppression, the sociocultural context that undergirds our society’s social problems, and our individual and collective moral and ethical responsibility to work toward solutions.

Something that continues to resonate with me about the CIT is the emphasis on critical reflection, dialogue, and the aspiration to address social problems. I would argue that every college classroom should be a space for reflection, dialogue, and solution development, regardless of institutional type (e.g., public, private, two-year, four year, religious, secular, HBCUs, HSIs etc.). I think the difference between SCU and other institutions is that this mission has a name (i.e., Catholic intellectual tradition). At SCU, there is a framework and precedent in place for guided reflection, dialogue, and solution development. There is an expectation that faculty and student affairs practitioners are creating spaces for the values of CIT to be enacted. While I don’t think there are structural methods of accountability to ensure these espoused values are enacted, outside of maybe course evaluations, I am confident our scholar- practitioners are enacting these values in a manner that is relevant to the student populations they serve and the disciplines they teach in. I am thankful for communal spaces in which we can talk about how the values of CIT can be enacted in our work, and discuss the triumphs, rewards, and challenges of incorporating these values in our curriculum.

Furthermore, I wonder how the CIT framework can be used to tackle some of the larger issues that plague higher education (e.g., access, affordability). How can this framework be used in policy development, for example? One of our colleagues mentioned the potential future of affirmative action in college admissions and how the recent policy reversal presents an opportunity for SCU to be an innovator in creating policy workarounds for ensuring the continued diversification of college campuses. I responded to this comment by mentioning SCU is not currently doing the best job of ensuring class diversity on our campus, highlighting that affirmative action is an intersectional issue, and intersecting forms of diversity need to be addressed. Nonetheless, I left the conversation wondering, how might the future of affirmative action be different if Supreme Court justices and policymakers were well versed on the guiding principles of reflection, dialogue, and solution development? Imagine what educational equity would look like if practical and policy development required critical reflection and acknowledgement of our positionalities, dialogue about how these positionalities inform our opinions, and solution development that centers the positionalities that are amongst the most marginalized and ignored in our society? The values of the CIT are accessible for all, and there is a need to communicate that accessibility.

So again, I return to this question: “What impact do I want my work to have?” I want the impact of my work to be that all students can attend college without fear of being “microaggressed,” stereotyped, or harmed by their peers, staff, or faculty on their campuses. I want the impact of my work to be that staff and faculty are prepared to support and nurture the cultural wealth that all students bring into their classrooms and welcome the perspectives they bring to their assignments and projects. I want the impact of my work to be that staff and administrators can use my research to design and sustain retention efforts that are informed by the experiences of all students and alumni, rather than numbers that do not always tell the full story. I want the impact of my work to be that school leaders are responsive to issues of racism and all other isms on their campus and across the country, in ways that center their campus community’s mental health and wellness. This impact is not possible without critical reflection, dialogue, and solution development. Jesuit pedagogy is a tool we can rely on to realize such impacts in our classrooms. If we make a big enough impact, our students, regardless of their religious background or affiliation, will pass the CIT and Jesuit values along to their colleagues in various professional settings, their families and friends, and eventually the young people in their lives.