New Text on Identity and Learning in Sororities and Fraternities
I am excited to announce my 9th edited or authored text and my third sorority/fraternity text. This text will be also co-edited with Dr. J. Patrick Biddix (University of Tennessee) and Dra. Monica Lee Miranda (University of South Florida). This forthcoming text is tentatively entitled "Student Identity and Learning in Sororities and Fraternities (Working Title)" and will appear in the Identity & Practice in Higher Education-Student Affairs (IPHESA) Series (Pietro A. Sasso; Shelley Price-Williams as Senior Eds) by Information Age Publishing. Abstracts are due by May 1 and decision will be made by May 15. This text is the student-focused follow up to the initial two volume set on the sorority/fraternity experience that was released in January 2020.
Fraternities and sororities, especially culturally-based organizations, have historically focused on uplifting their culture or on the moral and professional development of their members. However, some sororities and fraternities shifted their focus on leadership development and service learning in response to compliance rhetoric facilitated by campus standards programs and calls for increased accountability (Sasso, 2012). This was a paradigm shift in ways that some sororities and fraternities organized and identified their purpose as the values-based congruence rhetoric faded and others reinvigorated their organizational identity to promote uplift and cultural transmission (Sasso, 2018). This shift also was juxtaposed to an epistemology of education which harkens back to the professional vision of adopting the “student personnel point of view” (American Council on Education, 1937, 1949), that is, the need to see the student “as a whole” in all their dimensions—physical, social, emotional, and spiritual, rather than strictly academic.
This text is a response to a call for existential exploration as an attempt to critically revivify our understanding of the sorority/fraternity experience as it contributes specifically to students’ identity development and learning. The underpinning of the text centers the experiences of the student to amplify the student voice. Chapters in this text will attempt to foreground how the fraternity/sorority experience explicitly contributes to these areas of student development across multiple identities including race, ethnicity culture, gender identity, social class, and ability.
This will also be the first text to profile the spectrum of diversity that comprises the contemporary college student across sororities and fraternities. The volume will discuss student populations, trends, and issues in regard to how they are supported by our institutions. Furthermore, it will individually highlight the identity experiences of the diverse spectrum of fraternity and sorority members individually, collectively, and highlight the intersections of identity so often excluded from the literature to include, but not be limited to, college student challenges and crucial issues facing students within their organizations.
Throughout this book, we invite students, their instructors, and other college/university practitioners to be mindful of the crucial, yet sometimes overlooked, connection between co-curricular campus activities and the academy’s cardinal aim of learning, which often obscures a focus on identity or affective development. In the wake of the #AbolishGreekLife and other calls for racial justice, the role of identity development also becomes ever increasingly important as we consider how to make the sorority/fraternity more inclusive for our students. In the end, it may really be the power of inclusion on college campuses that leads to many of the educational goals that we yearn for in student growth: the formal and informal social interactions, bonded in reflective learning, that help build social and academic success. In this we can celebrate together, especially those of us who have savored so many “bright college years.”
