In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, host Paul Brown sits down with Roompact Blogger Cohort member, Jordan Dedrick, to discuss her research into RA and student staff self-efficacy as it pertains to addressing conflict and mediations. Many campuses struggle with roommate conflicts in particular, and this episode provides some practical tips on equipping staff to help residents reach towards resolution.
Guest: Jordan Dedrick (she/they) is a housing and residence life professional whose interests include policy, student conduct and compliance, conflict, mediation, and Resident Assistant self-efficacy, and supervision. Jordan has worked in housing since 2012 when they were hired as a Desk Assistant. Outside of work, Jordan is a fitness instructor and an anime nerd who draws manga style pieces for conventions.
Host: Paul Gordon Brown, PhD
Listen to the Podcast:
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Show Notes:
- Read all of Jordan’s posts from the Roompact Blog
- Baxter Magolda, M. B. (2001). Making their own way: Narratives for transforming higher education to promote self-development. Stylus Publishing.
- Baxter Magolda, M. B. (2008). Three elements of self-authorship. Journal of College Student Development, 49(4), 269–284. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.0.0026
- Baxter Magolda, M. B. (2011). Authoring your life: A lifewide learning perspective. In N. J. Jackson (Ed.), Learning for a complex world: A lifewide concept of learning, education and personal development (pp. 76–99). AuthorHouse. https://www.lifewideeducation.uk/uploads/1/3/5/4/13542890/chapter_a1.pdf
- Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (241–258). Greenwood.
- Garlic, R. (2017). The missing piece: RA training and self-efficacy in conflict mediation. Journal of College and University Housing, 43(3), 27–42.
- Harper, J. & Kezar, A. (2021). Leadership development for racially minoritized students: An expansion of the Social Change Model of Leadership. Journal of Leadership Education, 20(3), 156–169. https://doi.org/10.12806/V20/I3/T2
- Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). (1996). A social change model of leadership development: Guidebook (Version III). University of California, Los Angeles.
- Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006
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Transcript:
Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast, your podcast where we talk about all things Residence Life and education. I’m your host for this episode, Paul Brown, and I’m excited to have a guest today that is actually a member of our blog cohort. So for those of you unfamiliar, we hire a number of different bloggers that work with us for a year, contribute their knowledge to the field. You can see all of their posts on our site. I encourage you to take a look at them. But today, I’m speaking with Jordan, who just joined us in the cohort earlier this year. How are you doing, Jordan? I think you’ve been in a move, is that right?
Jordan Dedrick:
Yeah, I’m doing well. Thanks for asking. I just moved down to Philadelphia area about a month ago, lots of things happening, got married, went on a honeymoon. So there’s still boxes in the corner-
Paul Brown:
Writing a dissertation.
Jordan Dedrick:
Writing a dissertation. We’re doing all the things here. Because you can never just do one thing, you should just continuously stack up everything because that is always amazing for your mental health. It’s like with lifting, just lift with your back. It’s fine.
Paul Brown:
Right, right. I’ve made that mistake a few times, in fact, recently. My dissertation advisor when I was doing mine said, “There’s three things you shouldn’t do when you’re in the middle of writing your dissertation, have a baby, take a new job, or get married.” And she’s like, “If you do that… But you’re towards the end, so I think you’re safe at this point.” But she’s like, “If you’re in the middle of it and you do one of those three things, or worse, multiple of those three things, that is a danger zone.”
Jordan Dedrick:
Which funny enough, I got told the exact same thing and moved across the country in my second year of the program.
Paul Brown:
Move was one of them too, and I think it was related to the job, not necessarily, but even just a move.
Jordan Dedrick:
So I moved and started a new job, and I moved and started a new job again. But to be honest, and we’ll talk more about my dissertation and everything, I’m very fortunate where I am in my life that my only dependent is a big dog that sleeps in the corner. So a lot of folks in my program are full-time parents and everything. So kudos to all the full-time parents who are getting their doctorates.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. I have no idea how they do it, because I even went full-time, so that allowed me to focus on it squarely. But people, especially if they’re doing it part-time and they have a… I’m just like, I have no idea. I would never finish if that was the case for me. So more power to them. Well, you’ve worked in Residence Life a while, so let’s maybe get a little bit of your background. Because I think that informs, I think, what your dissertation was on, which to preview for folks, we’re going to talk a little bit about roommate conflicts, mediation, specifically student staff addressing those. But you’ve been in this field for a while, starting from desk attendant, is that right? Can you tell us about that journey?
Jordan Dedrick:
Yeah. So I went to undergrad… I’m originally from upstate New York, so I did my undergrad at SUNY Oswego. Started as a desk attendant my sophomore year, and then got hired to be an RA junior year. Did that for a little bit, then went through a grad program at Oswego that one day I might finish. I realized in the middle of that program that I didn’t want to go into English and I wanted to continue working in higher ed. So my supervisors at the time were like, “Oh my gosh, thank goodness, because we’ve known this for a while. We were waiting for you to catch up. Here’s a folder of a bunch of programs that you could do this.” I ended up going to the University of Alabama for my grad program, was a graduate community director for two years before moving out to Arizona to be what was known as a hall director at the time. Now, it’s a community coordinator.
Switched roles in Arizona, stayed at the same institution, and then I was ready for the next step after five and a half years. So took a job out in Massachusetts as a mid-level manager role, and finished that up at the end of this semester. I will be starting a new role in occupancy management on Monday. So very different, but I’m super excited because I love spreadsheets, and numbers, and logistics, and procedures. And while I loved all of my work with the housing and the Res Life type side, I’m still in the Res Life atmosphere. But sometimes humans are difficult, and that’s the whole purpose behind the dissertation and the research, is humans are difficult.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes, it’s nice to take a little break from that, I think, right? It’s good, meaningful work when you’re working with messy human situations, but it can also be very taxing and overwhelming at a certain point as well.
Jordan Dedrick:
Absolutely. Folks who stay Res Life for life and continue managing and supervising up to the director levels, they are pros who can handle that, but it could be mentally and emotionally draining a lot of the times. So yeah.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, let’s dig into this dissertation. So I think about a lot… so our software has a roommate agreement module to it. And it’s the standard kind of whatever people may think about in terms of agreements. You would have terms, the roommates will sit together and write that. But I do watch how institutions approach it, and there’s a varied mix of ways that people approach that from being very prescriptive, to focusing on behaviors, to focusing on more attitudes and thinking through things. What was the spark for where you started this dissertation journey, looking at mediation and conflict, and specifically, student staff’s role with it?
Jordan Dedrick:
Yeah. So I saw from the time I was an RA up until I finished my most recent role, a lot of individuals would come and talk to me and say, “My roommate is terrible. They left a dirty plate out on the sink and I want you to kick them out of school.” And I would say, “That’s a bit much and I can’t do that, nor would I.” But I kept seeing this conversation over and over from the time I was an RA to a full-time to a mid-level manager, and I was confused of why are we still dealing with a dirty plate on the sink, or their bed’s messy, or something like that? And so I wanted to focus on how we address conflict and mediation. A lot of stuff in Res Life is very procedural, it has to be when we’re dealing with Title IX regulations, civil rights law, and Clery reporting and stuff.
The RA staff, student staff in general have to be knowledgeable about that, but it also creates this little dependence on things being written down. And people don’t write down their personalities, and their triggers, and how they want to talk to each other, which that’s part of what the roommate agreement wants, is how do we talk about conflict? And unless you are monitoring how the students write that down, you’re going to get everything from like, “Oh yeah, we’ll talk it out. We’ll do it this way.” They have a 10-step processing to talk about conflict all the way to one of my favorite responses was laser battle to the death. I don’t know how they were going to do that. So again, some people taking it super seriously, some folks who are not seeing the meaning to… some folks just not doing it.
So we cannot control 14,000 students on a college campus, making sure they all sit down and take it seriously and write things out, but we can train our student staff and enable them to feel confident in going in and having these tough conversations. So the focus of the dissertation is really leaning into community cultural wealth, which is a theory by Yosso… or a framework, rather, and utilizing the social change model of leadership development. I use the expanded version from Harper and Kezar, and then also just self-efficacy from Baxter Magolda. Those were the main frameworks that I was looking at for this, and I wanted our student staff to see that they came to their position with these skills to do it. There was a heavy reliance we saw in our pre-intervention surveys, a heavy reliance on outside factors and everything.
So that could mean they would go to their supervisor every single time they had a mediation because they’re like, “What should I do?” They would go back to their notes from training, they would talk to other staff members. They didn’t feel confident going in to have difficult conversations. And I think we see that in our students coming then to the hall directors and everything. It’s like they want to bypass their peer to go to the manager. And for anyone who’s been a hall director or an equivalent role, again, you can’t do 400 mediations a week. It’s just not possible. That’s why we have our student staff to have those conversations to help build community on their floor. That’s one of the main parts of their role. So yeah, it’s a little bit about the dissertation, is just kind of student staff and their perceived self-efficacy when it comes to addressing roommate conflict, and holding mediation sessions using those three frameworks.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah, you’re making me think, because I’ve written before, like I mentioned, since our software has agreements and I watch how different schools do it, I wrote a blog post a long time ago about the agreement document and saying it’s really about a process, not this product. I think sometimes, folks are like, “Oh, we’ll just fill this out. Great. Done.” And it’s like, “Well, how are you guiding them through that? What gets built around that? Do you prepare them for it?” A lot of schools come to different places on that, but sometimes, schools just plop it, it’s there, and if there’s a conflict, then maybe we’ll go back to it after the fact. So I like the fact that you’re focusing on, okay, well, what’s the process? What’s the discussion? What are the things leading into that? Do you have any kind of insight in terms of… well, I’m sure you do, of how do we get student staff to a place where they feel like they can meaningfully make change?
Because I think sometimes schools will be like, “Oh, here’s a script,” or things like that, in which case, they just read it, and you’re like, “Well, that’s not what I mean. We really want to build skills and capacities.” How can that be done?
Jordan Dedrick:
So I think what I found to be most impactful in reading some of the students’ responses from the intervention when we were talking about, “What are things that you’re taking with you, what are things that you’re reflecting on,” the biggest piece for them of that aha moment is connecting it to their own lived experiences, which is why we wanted to bring in the cultural wealth model to say, “You have this capital.” So Yosso’s framework on cultural capital builds off of Bourdieu’s theory, but it centers it more on communities of color and the strengths that they lend to each other through building community. So there’s navigational capital, there’s linguistic capital, and there’s six different forms. But when we think about our student staff, if we say navigational capital, well, you are trained in a position, you know what the resources are, you know how to better navigate this campus than some of the first year students.
You know what clubs exist. Linguistic could be literally you’re speaking the same language, maybe if English is not your first language, and you can connect with a person in a different language, or it could be like I’m a 33-year-old lady, if I were to say yapping at somebody, that’s already gone, I’m sure. But students who are coming in, first year students, now, they have their own language. They communicate differently than I would with someone my own age. And so those are strengths that they’re bringing in. Some of them are not tied to their training and their position. So when we’re seeing in their responses of like, “Oh, I was able to go through this scenario and I felt good about it because I was able to connect it to this time that I volunteered in high school,” or I think some folks wrote about, “Oh, I have done group therapy sessions or I’ve led group therapy sessions.
I am the oldest of four kids, and so I’ve had to do this type of thing.” It’s when they’re connecting it to their lived experiences, it helps them have that aha moment of, yes, you can rely on your training and you also have these other skills outside of the position because you are a human. We always say that to our student staff, is like, “You’re a human first.” It is challenging when you walk down to brush your teeth and you live and you are RA there, but you are a human first, and you’ve had 16 to 20 years of life before being in this role. How do you apply those skills that you’ve already built into pieces of this role? And I find that in conflict, it’s one of the best places to make that connection. Because you’re probably not coming in of using some sort of capital to bust a party or something. That’s pretty procedural.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, I guess I never really thought about it from that kind of angle before. Because certainly, if I feel unconfident, inconfident… unconfident, inconfident, not confident in something that I’m doing, what do I do? I go back to a script or a place of comfort where I’m like, “Okay, I’m just going to read this because I don’t feel comfortable or feel like I don’t have that confidence to make it my own and build off of those things.” So I revert back to like, “Oh, I’m going to follow a procedure or do this verbatim until I feel more comfortable,” in which case, “Oh, now, I can deviate from this, or change this slightly, or move this and I can understand what that is.” There’s probably many findings, but is that really kind of the nut that Residence Life people need to crack in terms of helping student staff get there?
Jordan Dedrick:
Yeah, I think there’s a heavy reliance on the procedural pieces and manuals. And again, those have their place, especially if we’re dealing with anything like Clery reporting. Yes, read your manual, do step one, two, three, four. Do not pass, go. But when we’re humans interacting with other humans, there’s not really a script. You have to learn how to listen and digest the information and then respond back. And there’s not many classes that teach that, you just have to practice. And so we get into, I think mainly October, from my time being in Res Life, is it’s usually October midterms where the honeymoon phase is over, midterms are coming up, we see higher alcohol rates and everything, people drinking more because it’s usually around homecoming, Halloween, you see more people burning off stress, going oot and aboot. But it’s always around October that these conflicts pop up more. Same in the spring semester, it’s usually for us around March, right before spring break.
And they haven’t had time to practice because their RA training was in late July, maybe August, depending on the school, for two to three weeks where everything is thrown at them. RA training has not changed much since I was an RA, and that was a decade ago. And so it’s so much information. You have student staff who are really just trying to do their best and digest it. We can go all into different learning styles, different accommodations, and you’re never going to be able to get it 100% right. So if they haven’t been practicing because there was the honeymoon phase, and the roommates all loved each other, and now, not so much, they’re going to be deer in the headlights because they haven’t had that continuous training. So in my problem of practice and in the research, that’s what we were looking at, is if we just continuously train them on these things and we bring in a curriculum-based model and dig into those personal strengths, how confident will they feel later?
So not necessarily groundbreaking of, yeah, you practice, and you practice, and you feel more confident. But when I was looking at the literature, there’s not much on this topic, this specific niche. There’s a lot on training and how curriculum-based training is proven to work, or we’re seeing more evidence of it working. So hopefully, that will catch on more as well to do more scaffolded training. But again, we’re doing the best we can in Res Life.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. I think about that kind of training when I’m talking about sequencing a student’s learning journey, how are we going to help our residents through their time? And one of the things I talk about a lot is train them on the things when they’re relevant at that time of year. So yeah, you might want to touch on roommate conflict, mediation, things like that at some kind of beginning training, but then do a deeper dive through an in-service, or a later training, or whatever format that takes, virtual, otherwise, whatever that may be, in the moment where that is most relevant for them to enact it. If students are struggling, you mentioned blowing off stress and things like that and things that happen in October, so let’s talk about what do students go through in October, in October, not in August or July. I think that is a broader shift, and I think it goes beyond just the conflict and that mediation part, but touches on all aspects of it.
Jordan Dedrick:
Definitely. And I think our training programs for student staff are usually developed by usually hall directors and mid-level managers and everything, but not often is there a training specialist to bring in and do that. And we’re in higher ed, there’s a lot of resources that we wish that we had to make it all work perfectly, but we don’t necessarily have the resources to have a training specialist come in and scaffold all this training. It’s going to be folks who are on the front lines, which I think is also really beneficial, but making sure that those folks say, “Hey, these are trends that have been popping off in my building.” As someone who’s in a mid-level manager role, I don’t know the students as well. And so I want to learn from the hall directors, our staff members who are in the buildings and get their understanding of what’s happening.
So I always use the example of the dirty plate, the messy bed. There’s the easy one of the significant other being there for an entire week. I’m like, “Okay, that’s easy to deal with.” But the ones that… the student staff going through this intervention, the scenarios that they really appreciated that we probably need much more on is what do you do when no one is at fault? And what do you do when there is identity as a part of the conflict? So some of the examples that I used was one person is a night owl, likes to play video games, and they have a very clacky keyboard. The other person is an athlete and has to get up in the morning for practice and whatnot. Both of them have a right to the space. You can’t just be like, “Oh, well, this guy is so terrible because he plays video games at night.” That’s some people’s schedules.
And again, he is paying for that room in this hypothetical scenario, and the other person is also paying for that room. So how do they work together to build a cohesive space where each person is getting what they want? And then we went in a little bit deeper of what if one roommate has to pray at certain times, so they have to have lights on or lights off to get ready to observe some of these religious either ceremonies, or just procedures, and whatnot, and that bothers the other person because they’re trying to sleep or they’re trying to do something else and they can’t be in the room at a certain time. Nobody’s at fault here. How do you build that? So the students had some really good examples of how they would address it.
But overwhelmingly, when they were doing their post-intervention surveys, they said that was the most impactful, was going through those scenarios and talking with each other of you’re getting input from a third year RA to a first year RA, and they can problem-solve together. You have the supervisor there leading this training who can give their input, but the supervisor who led a lot of these sessions for me said they really worked together. They problem-solved. She was there if they kind of got stuck, but they were doing all of the work on their own. So again, bringing in that capital that they already possess to help problem-solve with each other. And so by the end they’re like, “Oh yeah, I feel a bit more confident going into it. I still need practice because these were only three sessions.”
So in refocusing our training, yeah, we don’t need to necessarily do roommate conflict in July or August. Maybe say, “You know what? We’re late September, we’re going to start doing some of these, integrating this into our staff meeting because we tend to see in a couple of weeks, so we want to just do a little touch base on this,” and continue working through those scenarios. Because the roommate conflict you’re going to get day one of moving is usually something that’s not actual conflict. It’s going to be like, “My room is facing the wrong side of the courtyard, I can’t live here,” or, “I moved in and realized that this person likes different kind of music than I do, can’t live…” Those are very specific scenarios that only happen on day one. We’re talking that it’s not conflict, that’s just differences of personalities necessarily. So yeah, I think diving into it later when it becomes more relevant and you have more brain space to digest the information and practice.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. You’re making me think, I’m curious, maybe there’s research on it, I somehow doubt, what types of conflict come up at different points in the year, the stages of conflict? Like, in the first few weeks, these are more likely to observe, then it gets into this, then it gets. I’m sure every conflict is different and it probably can be a little bit all over the map, but I wonder if there’s some kind of general trends of the types of conflict. Well, this is about habits, habits are more likely to be the one at the beginning, and then it turns into something else, or things like that.
Jordan Dedrick:
Yeah, I’m not sure… I’d have to look into literature on that. I’m not sure if there is, at this point, this type of conflict-
Paul Brown:
Like a Tuckman’s group stages for conflict with living with other people.
Jordan Dedrick:
Yeah, because I think usually, what I would get around midterms of each semester is this problem has been there since the beginning, they just haven’t talked about it. It’s like the boiling kettle. If you leave it on the stove too long, it will eventually overflow. And it’s usually like, “Yeah, they’ve been eating my food since the beginning.” And I’m like, “Well, when did you tell them about that?” “I haven’t.”
Paul Brown:
“I let it go, and then it bothered me more.” Yeah. Yeah. Well, since you’re getting towards the end of your dissertation process, and you’ve already given us some of these nuggets, I think, in terms of approaches to training and things like that, what implications for practice, what would you tell Residence Life professionals like, “Hey, here’s some things I think you’d either need to think about or consider implementing or things like that that could help them through this”? Because I do get schools that come to me and say, “We need to focus on this more because it’s just eating up all of our staff time, and it’s out of control in terms of the amount, and we need to be better about being proactive to address it as it comes rather than being overwhelmed with a reactive.”
Jordan Dedrick:
Yeah, I think some major things… First off, I think upper level administrators, and this is going to sound a little shady, I don’t mean it to be shady, but It’s like these Gen Zers, it was the millennials, now it’s the Gen Z people, they just want this, “No, get that out of your head.” Anytime you form an opinion about an entire group based off of the squeakiest of wheels, it’s not going to be accurate. And you’re going to go in with that mindset of like, oh, this person just wants this, this, this, and whatnot. Really asking them questions of, “What do you want to have happen?” I think I had a conversation with a student who I used his scenario. He was the athlete who came in and was like, “This is what’s happening.” And I said, “Okay, well, what have you done about it so far?”
I said, “Have you tried earplugs?” And I said, “I understand you had your routine…” And he’s like, “Oh no, I can definitely try that.” Because they liked each other, they just had different sleep schedules. So he was like, “No, he’s a nice guy and everything. I just can’t sleep when he is clacking on his keyboard.” And so just asking open-ended questions to the students coming in. In terms of the training piece though, I think it’s what we were just talking about is really do an audit of training, have somebody on your team who’s good at conducting surveys.
You can, oftentimes, get SPSS through your institution for free so that you can run any type of statistical outputs and everything, see if anything is worth it. So what I mean by that is we tend to hear a bunch of RAs say, “Training wasn’t good in this area, in this area, this area.” And we get them to fill out a survey and we’re like, “This many people said this,” but it’s not statistically significant necessarily. But when we’re like, “A bunch of people are telling us this, we think that we need to swing the pendulum the other way.” It’s like sit down with your data, use what you have to your advantage, and really assess your training to see if it’s doing what you want it to do.
So in terms of conflict, having one BCD might not cut it to do the whole thing. You probably will have to continue training on it to continue practicing. Whereas when you go in and you have a full manual for incident response, that training is probably enough. But I would say really audit the training, use the tools that you have, have your student staff weigh in on what really resonated with them, what didn’t resonate with them. I know the student staff who went through my intervention said the first session was a little tough because it was very theory heavy. I said, “Yeah, you know what? Lecturing at a group for an hour, it’s probably tough.” And we did this during their staff meeting at the end of the day. So sitting for an hour listening to theory after you’ve had class all day probably isn’t it.
So I can now take that feedback and say, “We can break up some of the theory a little bit. I might need the 7,000-foot view as the researcher. Do they need it? Maybe. Some of them might be interested in it. What do they actually need to know?” And I think that also goes into what I would tell folks about training, is what do your staff need to know? They don’t need to know all case laws and everything because it’s going to go… unless they’re super interested, and if they’re super interested, they’re going to go look into it. They’re going to go find the deep dive and look at the articles. They will take the initiative to do it. But what do they need to know on a day-to-day for their job? When do they need to know it, as you said earlier, of October versus July? And assessing their own training and really looking into that curriculum training, the scaffolding training.
I think we all have the book on it by now, the curriculum design book. I think I have three copies of it. So yeah, I think that I’m still working on my chapter five, which has all my implications. So I’m shooting from the hip here a little bit.
Paul Brown:
That’s good. No, that’s good. Well, actually, my final question then really for you is one of the things is we do like to provide, “Hey, you want to do a deeper dive? Here’s the things you need to read.” You’ve been dropping pieces for us a little along the way, and we’ll include those in the show notes. So if folks want to click on a few links or get redirected to some other resources on this, are there any that you would say are, “Here’s some keys, here’s some really good things if you want to go deeper on this”?
Jordan Dedrick:
Yeah. I think Journal of College Student Development is a really good resource because it kind of takes some of the psychology lens to it a little bit. Not 100% of the times, but you do get folks who are talking more about behaviors and not just buildings and whatnot. I think you get a good mix of, I’ve read about folks who did a photo journal-
Paul Brown:
Yeah, I’m familiar with that. Yeah.
Jordan Dedrick:
… of spaces where they felt safe on campus. And a lot of them, they took pictures of their bedroom. And so even if the articles don’t feel like they would be relevant to what you’re studying, the fact that for me, I go, “Oh, if they feel the most safe and comfortable in their bedroom, and that’s then where they’re having conflict, definitely not related, either of those things.” A really great book that I used for the dissertation, the last name is Schulman, I believe, but it’s called Conflict is Not Abuse. And yeah, it’s a really good book. And the author writes about how we have this idea that if we are in conflict with someone, that we perceive it as some wrong has been done to us and then it needs to be punished. And so that’s why people have very emotional reactions when it’s really kind of like a difference of opinions a lot of the time, or a miscommunication. So she writes about a bunch of larger scale conflicts, but I use a little bit of her work, the social change model of leadership development, the expanded one.
So there’s the original, which I think is late ’80s, early ’90s, and then Harper and Kezar expanded it in 2021. Theory of Self-Efficacy, Baxter Magolda, and then Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth. I would look at Bourdieu’s cultural wealth as well, but again, it is very white-centered. But if you want to understand the context that Yosso comes from in her framework later, I think that is a good place to start. And selfishly, little plug, the Roompact Blogs. I do have a handful of the blogs because again, we have hall directors and folks who work in building who are experiencing this and writing about their personal experiences. So if you can pull some of these things and being like, “Okay, we have four blog posts about a similar topic, who else is experiencing this?” And you could see it at different institutions and different parts of the country. So yeah, I’ve used a handful of blog posts from previous cohorts to see this is what this person’s experience was, and this is what this person’s experience was.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s one of my favorite things about having the blog cohorts. Because when we developed it, the goal was to really let people write about the things that you’re passionate about. There are very few rules related to the cohort other than our audience is Residence Life professionals. That’s about the only one, so narrow in on that. But otherwise, there’s a lot of free rein, and I think a lot of people have just brought a lot of interesting perspectives to sometimes the same topic. I think some blog cohort members are like, “Well, someone’s already written about this.” I’m like, “Yes, but you haven’t written about this.” And there’s a lot of different ways you can approach a topic. So it’s okay if you write on something that someone else has, but it’s become a nice mosaic kind of ideas, I think, over time. And I thank you for being one of those writers.
So it’s been great. So thanks all for joining. I will include a number of show notes, stuff that we talked about here, links to other things, as well as all the articles that Jordan has written so far, and we’ll continue to write as we reach towards the end of the year. So thank you, Jordan, and thank you all for joining us for the most recent edition of ResEdChat.
