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CACUSS Identity Project, Then & Now
77 Plays1 year ago
This episode our on-air host Adam Kuhn is joined by Deanne Fisher as we explore the topic of the CACUSS Identity Project, Then & Now. We hope that you enjoy and choose to follow along as we release a number of episodes geared towards celebrating our past, present, and future as an organization.
About:
The CACUSS 50 Oral History Project is an initiative of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services in recognition of our organization's 50 years of engaging student affairs professionals in Canada. The series of podcasts is recorded and produced by: Sean Fast, Adam Kuhn, Nicholas Fast, Rachel Barreca, Stephanie Muehlethaler, Noah Arney, Sally Chen, Estefania Toledo, Paula Broderick, Jennifer Brown, Margaret de Leon, and Becca Gray. This podcast is recorded, produced, and published on the traditional territories of hundreds of Indigenous nations from across the northern half of Turtle Island, also known by its settler-colonial name, Canada. We are grateful for the opportunity to live, work, and learn on this land. For more information on the territories you may reside on, visit: https://native-land.ca/
Credits: Music: Expanding the Limits | Performed by Audiorezout & Written by Oleksii Striapchyi | Stock Media provided by Audiorezout / Pond5 Podcast Cover Art by: Ravi Gabble (UTM)
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Transcript
Introduction to the Caucus 50th Anniversary Oral History Project
00:00:20
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of the caucus 50th anniversary oral history project where we're trying to collect stories about our profession and our field and our organization.
Introducing Deanne Fisher and Her Role at Caucus
00:00:31
Speaker
My name is Adam Kewen. I use he, him and they, them pronouns. And I work at the university of Toronto and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Deanne Fisher, who's currently working at OCAD university as vice provost student and international.
00:00:43
Speaker
and has a rich history of working at the University of Toronto and deep involvement with caucus in a number of different ways, which I'm sure we'll explore through our conversation today. But welcome, DeAnn. Thank you. I'm really pleased to be here. This is a bit of a trip down. I've had to tap into my own memories to go back in time. So this will be fun.
Discussion on 'Leaders in Learning' Paper
00:01:03
Speaker
Well, and I feel like talking with you today, Deanne, we could talk about a number of things, like your involvement with caucus is kind of so deep and wide, but the subject of today is we're talking about the caucus identity project and the paper Leaders in Learning, which you were the author of. So before we jump into, you know, our first question about the origins of it all, let's start maybe high level about what is it? What is the Leaders in Learning point paper?
00:01:29
Speaker
Yeah, good question. So, you know, let's assume that lots of folks haven't read it because, you know, I think at the time that it was written and published, many, many folks in caucus had read it and it was kind of informing direction of the organization, but
00:01:46
Speaker
Part of me thinks like oh my god was that 12 years ago and part of me is like oh it was only 12 years ago but so I'm sure there's folks around to remember it and lots of new members in caucus who who've never heard of this paper and it's a little hard to find.
00:02:03
Speaker
It was, it came out of, and there's a good piece in the introduction. Sometimes when you read your own writing, you go, oh, did I actually write that? And sometimes you read and you go, I'm actually a pretty good writer. So I had a mix of those feelings as I reread it all these years later.
The Identity Project: Addressing Common Values
00:02:18
Speaker
You know, but it does do a pretty good job of saying that there's no, the caucus was not in crisis in, you know, I think I was commissioned to write that in late 2010, it's published in 2011.
00:02:29
Speaker
There was no crisis. It wasn't like some kind of like, you know, pivotal moment in time. But I think increasingly the organization felt, you know, it had not had any kind of mission statement really written since 1989. So that was a long time and it kind of evolved
00:02:50
Speaker
into what someone have described as like a collection of professions or what we would now maybe call community of practices, but at the time we didn't have that language. You know, there was the health folks and the accessibility folks and some of the housing folks had kind of, you know,
00:03:08
Speaker
come into the organization but there didn't seem to be a common set of values or principles or goals that was kind of gluing the organization together.
Impact and Intent of the Strategic Planning Paper
00:03:18
Speaker
So I think that's why the identity project was initiated. I have to give big shout out to Heather Lane who had been the caucus president just before this work began and who had done much of the research
00:03:34
Speaker
And so when I, I mean, I was commissioned to, I put in a proposal and it was like, I had been a writer for most of my career before going to student affairs anyway. And so I was handed a whole bunch of amazing, you know, literally, and I'm making a gesture of like a stack of paper, a whole bunch of amazing files to go through that Heather and others have really developed.
00:03:57
Speaker
And my job was to synthesize and try to get something into around 10 pages that would describe where we'd been, what the present state was, and what the future might hold, just to form the foundation for some kind of strategic planning exercise, which ultimately did happen after that. So it was just a level setting paper, I guess, is what I would describe it as.
Unifying Caucus Beyond a Conference
00:04:19
Speaker
Well, in preparing for our chat today and rereading it, it was really amazing to read it actually and see all the themes that you were able to tie together, kind of weaving through the historical context of the organization, kind of the field in general, the national context, like the amount of stuff that is kind of so elegantly, for lack of a better word, crammed into these 10 pages is really impressive. Like it's really beautiful. And Deanne, was that,
00:04:48
Speaker
Just so I understand the identity project was a larger thing and was this paper kind of a part of the identity project? Yeah, I think they and there are other caucus folks who around at the time who would have been even more involved in the identity project
00:05:03
Speaker
But I think the identity project was a wider piece of grounding work.
Growth and Organizational Structure of Caucus
00:05:10
Speaker
And this was the first paper that would help to kind of build the organization's identity that was commissioned to do. But there was a lot more that came after that.
00:05:20
Speaker
In fact, I think there was a second paper that I didn't have anything to do with after this one was published. But it was attempting to, and I think reasonably successfully, attempting to express something that all of the members of the organization would see themselves in.
00:05:43
Speaker
as opposed to is caucus just a conference is it just a convenient place where a bunch of different professional communities come together and they exist in kind of these separate streams and maybe there's a keynote that they all attend and that was it and you have to remember that like at that time i don't even think caucus had a single staff person jennifer hamilton came on slightly
00:06:07
Speaker
I might have been, you know, starting the paper and she came on as the first actual employee that caucus had at
Laying the Groundwork for Caucus's Identity
00:06:14
Speaker
that time. So caucus really was just a collection of volunteers and it was as strong or as weak as the members of the amount of effort the members would put in and it didn't have
00:06:24
Speaker
you know, a lot of structure and continuity to it at the time. So I think it also was a bit of the groundwork of like, if we are really an association that that is bound by a certain set of values and goals, then we had best invest, which started to for it to be less than just a sort of volunteer driven thing or less than just a conference and maybe a newsletter or something.
Synthesizing Research into a Concise Document
00:06:48
Speaker
So I think the identity project was really about trying to figure out who we were.
00:06:52
Speaker
Okay, so the broader context of this identity project, there's an RFP for, we're looking for someone to help us with, you know, some sort of paper to kind of pull these threads together. You're selected to do it. What, how do you, how does one begin? Where did you start? Well, I think it's important to, as I mentioned, you know, I was handed a whole bunch of research, including some interviews that have already been done.
00:07:20
Speaker
You know, there's some great folks who, you know, I've lost touch with some of them over the years, but had done, you know, Dave Hanna out at the University of Saskatchewan had done a great, I think it was his PhD dissertation, but was about
00:07:36
Speaker
The law in Student Affairs was like the first kind of, you know, we didn't have at that time. I think the first actual book about Student Affairs in Canada had just been published, but there wasn't like literature or reference material.
00:07:50
Speaker
we were largely, you know, boring from the US or just, you know, making it up as we went along. So there were, but, you know, we were able to collect source documents. Nona Robinson had just finished her dissertation around values and ethics in student affairs. That was really helpful. But I didn't have to do a lot of original research. I was doing mostly secondary and then drafts of it went
00:08:19
Speaker
to the caucus board multiple times for feedback and revision. So it was pretty iterative to get to that final, the final paper that you see or you can find somewhere on the internet.
00:08:32
Speaker
And okay, so you're pulling the threads between all these different amazing sources. And you've also, I think you named David Hanna and Heather Lane and Nona Robinson. And in the text, you also reference the book that Don Hardy Cox and Carney Strange wrote. Exactly, yeah, yeah.
00:08:52
Speaker
Ian Cull and Peggy Patterson and Heather Cummings. So you've got all this great stuff to work from. And then how do you begin this kind of Herculean process to synthesize it into a digestible white paper? Because no one, no one would want to read like a page, you know, white paper people are looking for.
00:09:09
Speaker
Well, yeah, that like, I'm not going to reveal my writing processes, because then everybody would figure out how to do it. And it wouldn't be a valued skill. I do think I do think and like, if you ask chat GPT or something to write it that it couldn't do. And I'm not saying I'm, you know, amazing or anything. I'm just saying that the real task was just is synthesis is like get it down to
00:09:37
Speaker
I think it's just like 10 pages or something from literally hundreds of transcripts and books and source material to something that we can agree is deep enough to bind us, but, you know, short enough that most of the members would actually read it and be able to comment. And there were feedback sessions at the conference and so on and so forth.
Enduring Themes in Education
00:09:59
Speaker
So, you know, I think I was probably given a page limit, like you have to do this with it.
00:10:07
Speaker
But I'm very good at self-editing. I'm not a verbose writer, and I actually think most great writers are actually good at writing short. Writing long is easy. Writing short is much more difficult. So every single word in that document would have been, I would have taken, if there were three words that could have been turned into one word, I would have done that over and over again.
00:10:25
Speaker
So, you know, as a result, it is pretty concise. Like when I reread it today, I do think that there's stuff missing and we'll talk about that, like for sure. But it does manage to capture the moment in time pretty well with not a lot of words. Yeah, it's astounding, actually. It's really, really great.
00:10:47
Speaker
And there's some things, I know we'll get into this, you know, when we talk about some of those questions about maybe what's missing or what you would do differently, but even rereading it and like some of these things, and I know 12 years in some ways isn't a long time, but other ways, you know, it's quite a bit of time. And some of these issues that you've named are still the things that are top of mind today that are in the theme thinking around, you know, Indigenous education, access, diversity and inclusion, kind of global learning, globalization,
00:11:15
Speaker
accountability like these themes are really kind of really still prominent i think uh yeah i i had the same feeling i was like oh actually you know i if um you would ask me without reopening the document
00:11:30
Speaker
you know, did we at that point understand the severity of the impact of the student mental health crisis? I would have said, oh did we, did we? And then I read it and I go, oh we knew we did not maybe understand the full scale of where that would go, but we certainly knew 12 years ago that it was a major issue that we would be contending with and working on for a long time. So, you know, I
00:11:57
Speaker
It's always surprising to me how a little higher education changes over time and how much inertia there is within higher education. And sometimes I pick up things that were written 30 years ago and it could have been written today. So a lot of it is still very, very pertinent and relevant today.
Student Affairs Role in Education
00:12:20
Speaker
But it is interesting in that the amount of
00:12:25
Speaker
In a very short document, time and space we give around what at that time we called Aboriginal education, Aboriginal students, the language has changed. But, you know, that's pretty true to me.
00:12:36
Speaker
Truth from Reconciliation Commission, like that document was written before the TRC, though we certainly had our cap, like the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples had already come out, so that it's not like we were starting from nothing, but I do think it shows that, God, this has always been pretty aware and prescient about what's coming, and that just shows its members' ability to read the signals and understand what's actually happening.
00:13:04
Speaker
amongst our students and to be able to articulate those. So it's better than I thought. I still think that there's big gaps, but we'll get there. So did you have a sense when you were writing it of how it might be used? I know you mentioned that it kind of helped inform a strategic plan for caucus, but was there a sense of like, okay, I'm building this thing and it's going to be kind of distributed or implemented in a particular way?
00:13:30
Speaker
You know what, I have to be honest, I really didn't. I approached this, I obviously have been involved in caucus for all my years at U of T and through most of them here at OCAD when I moved here.
00:13:42
Speaker
um but i um was not i was never i've never been on the board of caucus i was never like formally involved in the organization at the governance level um i really took it as a writing project um and i was actually quite surprised i mean it was published in the the print you know caucus communique magazine that was
00:14:07
Speaker
distributed to all members for many years. It was the focus of the next conference. I was actually quite surprised the degree of focus I received and then I heard somebody went to one of the
00:14:21
Speaker
training institutes run out of church at the University of Manitoba and they came back and they said they actually like part of the curriculum was your paper your name was there and I had no idea. But it did seem to have quite a lot of impact at the time but that was just a pleasant surprise. I really didn't know where they were going to go with it and I just handed it you know did my bit of writing and then saw it circulating in these ways that I didn't anticipate.
00:14:48
Speaker
Well, I think some of the impact is still, it's remarkable when I think about some of the things, whether they came out of this paper or not, but I feel like it must have had some sort of influence because when you even talk about staffing, our identity as an organization, the competency model, the move to the COP model, there's just been so much change, I think, since this was written in 2011.
00:15:11
Speaker
that I see some of the threads coming back to some of the questions that you were asking and so I think it really to me reflects a turning point for caucus. One of the things that I was as I was rereading it the paper says
00:15:25
Speaker
Student Affairs practitioners with our deep appreciation for context and student development are poised to serve as mediators in this growing conflict between students and the institutions that serve them. And so I think really emphasizing, and this comes up too in some of the values that you had identified too, do you think this is still true today? Do you think Student Affairs folks are still in this place of
00:15:52
Speaker
Appreciating that context appreciating the whole student and kind of mediating this relationship with the broader organization or institution Yeah, I think maybe even more so from my perspective like I you know, I very much tried to keep my own opinions out of That paper because that was supposed to you know to some extent reflect the commonality of the organization the common
00:16:15
Speaker
ideas of an organization, but I do have opinions. And maybe they surface from time to time, because I, when I reread that, I kind of go, Oh, wow, I was maybe a bit bold in some places, but nobody's got me. And I guess, like, maybe to expand a little bit on the context of what that particular section was about.
00:16:37
Speaker
and still feel really strongly about this, that higher education had come from a place where it was largely the playground of elites, right? Lots of folks couldn't come to college or university, particularly not university. And lo and behold, all this evidence starts to emerge that higher education seems to be connected to social and economic mobility. Oh, look, people with education are making more money.
00:17:07
Speaker
So, you know, then we go through this period in the 70s, 80s where, you know, enrollment, there's a bit of an enrollment boom and folks from all backgrounds are saying, oh, the key to social and economic mobility is send my kids to college or university. So it's very much an access period, all through, I'd say we're still very much in some ways in an access period, trying to keep the doors wider and wider and wider.
00:17:35
Speaker
Um, and then lo and behold, um, folks, students and their families start to say, Hey, where's, where's the job at the end? Um, and people have always kind of resented that because it feels like students are like, they just want the transactional, like I want the credential and where's the return on investment.
00:17:57
Speaker
And we resent it and we think, well, that's not what higher education is about. Well, actually it is. And it's totally reasonable for people to seek education as a route to some kind of social and economic mobility for their kids and their families and so on and so forth.
00:18:14
Speaker
because the elites have been doing it forever. So I find it quite classist when we resent that students expect some kind of return at the end and their families on that investment. Of course there should be a return, of course they should have a share of the wealth as well.
00:18:33
Speaker
I think where we come in as student affairs practitioners is to demystify the formula. The reason that those wealthy people who went to higher education in the past came out, got great paying jobs and continue to be wealthy is A, they were already wealthy.
00:18:52
Speaker
Wealth begets wealth, so that's no secret. But secondly, they didn't just go to class and, you know, get good grades and then walk out with a piece of paper and expect that that would parlay into some kind of, you know, fancy job. They had the privilege of leisure. They didn't, like, by and large back then, you know, maybe pre, you know, in the 70s and earlier.
00:19:18
Speaker
They weren't largely holding part-time jobs. They weren't struggling to keep a roof over their heads. And so they were participating in athletics and student politics and student journalism and all of these things that were then increasing their social capital so that by the time they emerged, they had a network. They had been in rooms where power and privilege and wealth exists. And so that was parlayed into success. And so part of our job is to help
00:19:48
Speaker
today's students, which are not those by and large, not those students, understand that the way to navigate the system is and to build the the or design the system so that folks who may need to work part time in order to afford or may need to study part time or may take longer or may have families.
00:20:08
Speaker
How do they benefit from all of the richness of what a higher education experience can be so that they do get that return on investment? So I think that's what's meant by that very provocative sentence in the middle of thing is that there's a.
00:20:22
Speaker
There's a way to achieve the outcome that people want from higher education. It's not written anywhere. It seems like it's the piece of paper. It's actually not the piece of paper. It turns out it's the experience and that's all I think always been our role. And I actually feel like it feels to me, maybe it's aging a bit, but it feels like it's even more transactional. Like there's even more of a sense right now that it's like I pay for a series of credits that culminate in a degree.
00:20:52
Speaker
which is a piece of paper that should get me some kind of outcome. And unfortunately, I don't think that's ever really been the formula. Sorry, that was a rant. But it did bring up a lot of those. And if I could just veer off for a second, there's a section in the paper where we talk about emerging trends, issues and approaches in Canadian student affairs.
00:21:15
Speaker
Again, I feel like a lot of this could be said today, but we've got strategic enrollment management, student mental health and well-being, the built environment.
Challenges in Supporting Distance Learners
00:21:23
Speaker
One thing that I think is particularly prescient is around support for the distance learner. And I feel like given the context of the last few years, because in this section you kind of talk about the level of access that distance learning provides, but the challenge is that the benefits of the learning environment, co-curricular experiences and support services are
00:21:43
Speaker
much more difficult, though not impossible, to deliver. And so I was just, as I was reading this, I was like, this is, the last few years are kind of a case study in expanding on this idea. Yeah, I read that too, and I kind of chuckled because we used to think that was next to impossible.
Pandemic's Influence on Education Models
00:22:05
Speaker
to achieve any kind of the corollary benefits of higher education if you were a distance learner. How are we possibly supposed to recreate this experience? And I think remembering that this was written at a time where we might have had Skype
00:22:22
Speaker
with their Skype. I don't know where Skype went. How did that Skype not benefit from years of a pandemic? Yeah, they missed something. Someone missed something. I think they maybe got bought out or something. I have no idea. But like before the pandemic, it was all like, if you did video conferencing, it was largely Skype. And then all of a sudden Teams and Zoom and Google and all this kind of usurped it. But anyway, like the point being, we didn't
00:22:45
Speaker
We didn't really, we kind of knew that that would be something that would take off and that we were going to have to translate what we were doing in this 100% on-person environment into something that could be modified for distance learners. But, you know, nothing like a great crisis to show us, like, you know, obviously it could be done. Obviously it's still being done. And I think this hybrid kind of form of student affairs is here to stay. Although I'm, you know, a in-person person.
00:23:15
Speaker
through and through. I don't believe it can be totally recreated, but I certainly think we can deliver some engagement. It's pretty hard to make friends in an online environment.
The Value of In-Person Relationships
00:23:26
Speaker
It's relatively easy to maintain them.
00:23:29
Speaker
But remembering that we've got students who've never met each other before. It's pretty hard to develop a relationship. It's relatively easy to continue one. So I still think there's lots that can be done there. But I did chuckle that it reads as if we think it's the biggest possible challenge we're going to ever face. And then in two years, we figured it all out.
00:23:55
Speaker
And coming back to, I mean, you were talking about kind of the access discussion, and I think that connects to this next question, which is around how we define success.
Shifting Definitions of Student Success
00:24:03
Speaker
Because in this section about core values, you speak about the shift in how we define success of being something that maybe is institutionally defined, or maybe more broadly socially defined.
00:24:13
Speaker
but then you're saying how success is ultimately defined by the learner and so I feel like this to me reflects a distinct shift from really strict notions of success which is you know you get these grades or you get this job or whatever to really kind of having it being student-centered which is kind of one of the values that came out of of the identity project. Do you think this is how do you see this playing out in colleges and universities today about the shifting notion of of success and how
00:24:41
Speaker
it being learner-defined might be a better way to go. Yeah, yeah. I'll be honest, I still see that as not truly realized yet. At the time this was written, a lot of institutions, including, you know, I just come from U of T at the time and
00:25:04
Speaker
We had consultants in from the US, Richard Keeling and his colleagues who had written a fair amount around learning outcome. They were kind of at the forefront of applying the notion of learning outcomes to co-curricular activities and that everything that we were doing could have value from a learning perspective. And that was a relatively new movement for us in Canada. I think they've maybe been doing that a little bit more in the US.
00:25:34
Speaker
And UT in particular, and I know some other institutions have invested a lot and probably you're still doing this work, I don't know, but around defining our benefit or what is the output in terms of learning outcomes rather than just bumps and seats or
00:25:54
Speaker
any other kind of count that we might do. And so, you know, kind of fundamental to understanding learning outcomes is understanding that it, again, is not transactional. And so it's not a grade, it's not a credit, it's not a degree or a diploma or certificate. It's actually, does the student, can the student identify that they learned something that they didn't know when they came into an experience, like, and on the way out, they're like, oh, I'm actually much better at working
00:26:24
Speaker
in teams as a result of playing a sport, for example, as a really basic one, that everybody kind of intuitively understands, like sports built teamwork skills. But you can actually document and show that in a really defined way that can then, you know, you can use if you're really good at this to, you know, advocate for resources, because it's all part of that experience.
00:26:48
Speaker
that I talked about earlier. But I don't know, like, you know, I'm sitting in a very small institution. And so maybe I'm a little less connected. But I don't really feel that we as a movement or nationally have really advanced on that. I still feel like success is, and there are systems and funding mechanisms from whatever that are running counter to that idea.
00:27:14
Speaker
And so I still think largely in colleges and universities, we define success as graduate, like walk across a stage, you are successful.
Addressing Gaps in Student Needs
00:27:24
Speaker
I don't know about you, but I know an awful lot of people who walked across that stage who would not consider their educational experience successful. And I know lots of successful people who never graduated and got what they needed from the one, two, three years that they were in an institution or switched a couple of times and who were very good at figuring out what they needed, but could care less about
00:27:48
Speaker
the credential at the end of it. So I still feel like that's never really been fully, it's never come to fruition in my mind. I could hear others argue the reverse, but it just feels that way to me. Yeah, and I would tend to agree.
00:28:05
Speaker
So thinking back... It was a dream. Yeah, absolutely. So thinking back, like, you know, it was 12 years ago that this was written, is there anything that you maybe would have done differently, anything that you would add or expand upon or give more or less space to?
Missing Topics in Original Paper
00:28:21
Speaker
I don't think I could have given less space to anything. It's a very tight document. But I did...
00:28:29
Speaker
cringe in rereading it, thinking about, I don't think gender, gender identity, gender expression appears at all.
00:28:38
Speaker
Um, and you know, I'm a little embarrassed how that doesn't appear because it wasn't 30 or 40 years ago. It was 12 years ago. For goodness sakes. Uh, you know, I knew like I had done trans employee at the time. I knew I'd been through workshop. Like we knew that it was something that was in the, how did that discourse, but yeah. Okay. Yeah. How did that not make it in there? So I don't know. Um, but it certainly is playing a very, very big role, I think among
00:29:08
Speaker
students and campuses today. I don't think there's enough about student mental health in there. I don't think there is enough about affordability. I think that there's some stuff around access and who's coming to college and university, but I don't think that it's really poignant enough or like it doesn't really get to the point of, and it's, you know,
00:29:39
Speaker
from many aspects, it's not the tuition that's the problem. It's the living away from home and the materials and like all of the other costs that are escalating in most places where there's a concentration of higher education, not necessarily everywhere, but in most places, most cities in Canada, it's becoming, and I think we could have seen signals to that and we didn't see them, I think, at the time.
00:30:06
Speaker
I don't think there's enough about loneliness and isolation, which is epidemic. Maybe we couldn't have seen that then. Maybe we still thought everybody was making friends and having a great time. But I think we knew that some students weren't.
Identity and Professionalization of Student Affairs
00:30:24
Speaker
We should have said something because the social role that we play is so, so important. And it's just not necessarily just about preventing mental health.
00:30:37
Speaker
having a fulfilling developing relationships, all of that stuff. So I don't, I think we missed it on that front. Well, and do you think that's part of, and maybe I'm miss like assigning this, but I also think in terms of some of the ways that our field and our profession were seeking like credibility was actually moving away from the social parts. Cause I think we didn't want to be just the like party throwers.
00:31:02
Speaker
And so we wanted to see, but now we see like actually those social connections like that, the relationships that people are building, the people that they got to know that they didn't know before are actually part of that mental health spectrum that we talk about, you know, that supportive community, that connection. That's just a guess, that's just a shot in the dark, but I wonder if that's part of it.
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's such an interesting question, Adam, because I've never been a huge proponent of seeing Student Affairs as a capital P profession. I've always been really comfortable in describing myself as a generalist with a skill set that happens to be useful in putting programs together and in communicating.
00:31:43
Speaker
you know, bringing people together, facilitating like all of those things that we use every day, but I've never really, like I've never wanted to credentialize it or anything. That's just my personal opinion, but it is possible. And I've always found like, you know, if someone says to me, Oh my God, you're like a camp counselor. Like, I think that's a huge compliment. I never went to camp in my life. Family could never have afforded it.
00:32:06
Speaker
But if you tell me I'm like a camp counselor, like badge of honor, like, sure. Yeah. Have I built a 25 year career on being a camp counselor? Absolutely. And I have no shame whatsoever in that. Um, like bringing people together, seeing connections, helping people form relationships and bonds and friendships and, you know, whatever, getting stuff done together, even if they're not friends is like,
00:32:32
Speaker
I just think that's the stuff of life like it's just like the most rewarding stuff to me is to see that kind of stuff happen. And anything that to me takes away from that and obviously both things can be true, right? We can be camp counselors. And we can also have professional credentials and have research and literature behind what we're doing at the same time, like they're not either or. But it is possible that at the time we were much more about trying to build up our professional credibility in the face of
00:33:00
Speaker
You know, I've never been jealous. I've never wanted to be a faculty member. I've never taught a day in my life. I've never wanted, like, it's just not my thing. So I've never been jealous of faculty. I've never been a wannabe. I just think I do something different. We all make choices in life. I made it, chose a different path.
00:33:16
Speaker
I'm quite happy with that and so it is possible that the balance was a little more towards like how do we establish our credibility because it can feel like we're disrespected and not known and that we're operating in kind of an invisibility especially in large academic institutions research focused institutions and we did think that like if we built up our
00:33:40
Speaker
kind of research and literature and professionalization that somehow that would be more important. I guess I've always been on the other side. Like if I can get a group of people to like have a good time, make some friends and that continues beyond their years, then like my job is done. And so it's never really been about that for me. And maybe there's a little bit of that in the paper again, tried to keep my own views out of there, but maybe they sneak in from time to time.
Caucus's Role in Advocacy
00:34:06
Speaker
Just moving into kind of our last question, which is based on the last section, which is the role and future of Canadian Association of College University Student Services, where you ask some really great questions. You've got, I think, five different questions. What role should caucus play in bringing profile to our work at a national scale? Does caucus have capacity to organize multi-institutional assessment activities? How can caucuses use technology and social media more effectively?
00:34:33
Speaker
Does the organizational structure of caucus support collaboration the most effective way? And then should caucus actively support the professionalization of student affairs? So these, I think, are really meaty questions. And I like how in a paper kind of gathering together all these themes about our identity that it actually concludes with some like, actually, we've still got some questions that we need to work on. In what ways do you think caucus has started answering these questions, if at all?
00:35:03
Speaker
Well, I feel like I read that and I would say like 90% there. Like I read those and I thought, oh, like remembering, as I said near the beginning, that at the time this was written, if we had a staff person, it was like just barely. That, you know, part of the background of this project was around trying to figure out whether investments needed to be made, whether it was just a federation of like,
00:35:32
Speaker
convenient Federation of, you know, professionals who happen to work in higher education, or whether there was whether there was some glue that held it all together. And were we willing to, you know, invest to build it up as its own student affairs as its own identity. And I think we talked about I didn't say this at the beginning, but I think we do. It started with student services, it's like there's been various labels, we go to student affairs just as the broadest common term, some people don't use it. But
00:36:01
Speaker
It just makes sense. But I am, I think the piece, and I'm less involved in caucus lately, partially because I, you know, my role has changed. I'm overseeing international relations and
00:36:14
Speaker
enrollment management, which sucks up a lot of time here. But I'm not sure I see the advocacy piece yet.
Evolution and Outreach of Caucus
00:36:20
Speaker
I think caucus has struggled as an organization to know when it can advocate on behalf of its members. And its members are definitely aligned to their institutions. So those cannot be in conflict, we cannot have an organization nationally
00:36:40
Speaker
taking positions or advocating that may be at cross purposes with our own institution's view. Obviously, you know, we're not tenured faculty with like, you know, complete academic freedom. We are beholden to our employers. And so that's always been a slight tense relationship, although I've definitely seen some of the other organizations that I belong to take more of an advocacy route, especially during the pandemic, like galvanize the members, get a statement together,
00:37:10
Speaker
present that to the, whether it's IRCC, you know, federally or, so maybe caucus still struggles with whether it can advocate and the difference between advocating for its members and advocating on behalf of institutions. It has no real claim to advocate on behalf of institutions, but its members, I think it could, but I've seen lots on the,
00:37:34
Speaker
Yeah, maybe even students, right? Like, it's true. Although I'm sure our friends at CFS and other organizations would say, no, thank you, but respectfully don't need you. But I've seen so much great work since this was done on like all the member outreach stuff is so much better. There's been structural change. I've seen great research and assessment and you know, the communities of practice like I think they're
00:38:04
Speaker
At the time this was written, caucus had a few, it had, you know, the counselors had their sort of, I don't even know what they were called, but they were other associations and the disability service providers, as we would have called them now, now accessibility, I think we're in there. NASA, the Aboriginal student service folks had just kind of formed as their own.
00:38:30
Speaker
organization within the umbrella of caucus and then everybody else was in this thing called SaaSaa. It was like just this giant catch-all of everybody from red like and like you know probably a dozen different really forms of expertise and specialization that were just kind of bucketed and now of course we see the student conduct folks as a community of practice we see the you know orientation transition as a specific community practice so all of that I think came after
00:38:59
Speaker
this was written. And so sure, is it is it challenging to maintain that many communities of practice and get them all so I know some of them want, you know, Wayne and whatever, but.
Legacy of 'Leaders in Learning'
00:39:09
Speaker
Um, it's a much more diverse set of, um, identities that people can relate to through communities of practice rather than these like, you know, giant professional buckets that we had before. Um, so I think all of that has been, uh, you know, answering those questions. Um, so like 90% of the way there, uh, in 12 years, not bad, not bad, not bad at all. Um,
00:39:36
Speaker
Dan, that's kind of the conclusion of the questions that I have prepared, but I guess maybe in wrap up, as you were looking back on your writing and kind of thinking about the questions that we're going to talk about today, was there anything else that kind of came to mind for you as you were thinking about leaders in learning? That is funny. I think the hardest part of writing this whole document was coming up with a title for it.
00:40:03
Speaker
Uh, nobody knew what to call it. And I don't even know if I came up with leaders in learning or somebody on the caucus board did. And it seemed profound at the time. And now I look at it and go, engineering pinpoint is probably 17 documents with the same name. What, what did we mean? So it took me a bit to kind of go, I think it's maybe at the time.
00:40:25
Speaker
You know, going back to that conversation earlier about how important identifying that we were doing as having learning outcomes, that it was part of the learning process, was all of the work around self-advocacy that they might do in accessibility, all of the work in mental health, all of the work in residence, all of those things were all really about learning on some level or another. And we were really trying to establish ourselves as part of a learning agenda.
00:40:55
Speaker
And in fact, that we could lead higher education to a different way of thinking about where learning occurs and how. And so, yeah, I thought we should have probably had a better time before, but maybe it made sense at the time. I find it boring, to be honest, or generic. But I think there were 20 different ideas thrown around of what it could be, and that's where it landed. I also don't think it really recognized
00:41:24
Speaker
the lack of diversity within the field itself at the time. I think we knew and we could name it or see it, but you might name it privately, like, oh, geez, that word looks very white, or like, you know, there had been very few, even women who had been the president caucus at the time. And so, but I don't think we were, we had the language
00:41:51
Speaker
and the wherewithal to kind of be very forthright and the ways that caucus is now very, very clear about the need to have diversity within the field and within caucus itself as an organization. I don't think we named it clearly enough at the time. It might be subtly in there, but yeah, we were forthright. Oh, if I could go back in time.
00:42:14
Speaker
Well, and to look back, you know, in retrospect in these things, and I think in comparison with what we know to be true today, it's such an interesting activity. And I sometimes wonder, you know, if someone were if we put in an RFP for leaders and learning 2.0, what that would look like, and what some of the trends and questions would be, I'm sure like some of them would be enduring from 12 years ago, but there might be some greater
00:42:38
Speaker
attention to particular aspects. Yeah, for sure. Really cool to think about and explore. Yeah, but that's, you know, I think about, you know, what you wrote, and I think, and you know, I've got the mission of student services back from 1989, like these are these, these serve
00:42:52
Speaker
our organization in really specific ways at the time that they're published, but then they also serve as these kind of benchmarks of like, what is going on for our organization at that time? They kind of are, you know, this archival moment that I think is also really useful kind of in a macro sense. So I think, of course, would we do things differently in retrospect? But yeah, that's, I think that's life to a certain degree. And I think
00:43:15
Speaker
having these are extremely useful. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I never thought about it having a legacy at all. I think when you're in the moment, you just think it's serving, that it's quite utilitarian. It's just serving a purpose to get us to some strategic planning. You don't really think about it in terms of it being archival or having any kind of like telling a story about a moment in time. But of course it does. Yeah, it does. Well, thanks, Deanne. I appreciate your time. And maybe we'll just end it there. Yeah, thanks for having me.
00:44:04
Speaker
The Caucus 50 Oral History Project is an initiative of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services in recognition of our organization's 50 years of engaging student affairs professionals in Canada. The series of podcasts is recorded and produced by Sean Fast, Adam Kuehn, Nicholas Fast, Rachel Barreca, Stephanie Mulettoller, Noah Arney, Sally Chen, Estefania Toledo, Paula Jean Broderick, Jennifer Brown, Margaret De Leon,
00:44:34
Speaker
and Becca Gray. Intro and outro music is courtesy of Alexei Stryapji. This podcast is recorded, produced, and published on the traditional territories of hundreds of Indigenous nations from across the northern half of Turtle Island, also known by its settler-colonial name Canada. We are grateful for the opportunity to live, work, and learn on this land. Miigwetch.