Critical student affairs pedagogy: A qualitative study of student affairs educators’ beliefs and practices for teaching in undergraduate settings

Abstract

After nearly 100 years, student affairs’ educational role in colleges and universities continues to be debated (ACPA, 1937; McCaughey & Welsh, 2021; Penney, 1969;). While student affairs personnel, at the field’s origins, contributed to student learning through outside-the-classroom experiences (Long, 2012), student affairs educators are increasingly serving as instructors in classroom settings (Skipper, 2017; Young & Hopp, 2014). No literature has studied the experiences of student affairs educators who create and maintain a pedagogy for classroom teaching. Using critical, hermeneutic phenomenology, this story explored the lived experiences of student affairs educators’ pedagogy. Following Peoples’ (2021) six-step process of analysis, the data revealed five major themes: (a) student affairs educators’ belief in cocreation of knowledge, (b) putting their beliefs to practice through facilitation techniques, (c) developing students for serving the interests of a greater good, (d) personal influences, doubts, and motivations for their pedagogies, and (e) cultural and structural challenges to enacting student affairs pedagogy. A discussion and interpretation considered the participants’ pedagogies as an expression of critical pedagogy as contextualized by critical pedagogy scholarship (hooks, 1994, Freire,1971) and contemporary culturally engaging and critical publications in student affairs (Museus, 2013; Quaye et al., 2018).