RAISE Center
I am excited to announce that I will be serving as the director of a new research center at Stephen F. Austin State University in the Department of Human Services & Educational Leadership. This new research initiative will be the Center for Research Advancing Identities & Student Experiences (RAISE). The RAISE Center will support research activities for faculty and staff in the study of higher education specifically related to the identity development and experiences of college students. The Center will promote humanistic research and critical praxis to amplify voice, affirm identity, and advancing belonging about college student development and their experiences to better understand their formative lived experiences and multiple identities. The Center will host my current Identity & Practice in Higher Education-Student Affairs text series, a forthcoming academic journal, and conduct two research studies per year. It will feature a research advisory board and form an identity scholars network. The Center will also affiliate with the Timothy J. Piazza Center for Fraternity & Sorority Research and Reform at Penn State University. The university announced this recently in a press release.
The Center will be grouped around centering their experiences through three A’s: Amplifying Voice, Affirming Identity, and Advancing Belonging.
1. Amplifying Voice will foreground marginalized social identities across student populations to explore how the college student experience expands their developmental narrative despite systemic barriers and personal challenges.
2. Affirming Identity will center specific identities across gender, racial, and cultural identities to discuss how institutions or their individual lived experiences influences their identity salience and may facilitate learning across differences.
3. Advancing Belonging will highlight the potential ways in which the college experience can involve student populations the research notes as “invisible identities” which are often pushed to the far boundaries of the co-curricular experience.
Thus, the Center will 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 aforementioned student movements and other calls for racial justice, the role of identity development also becomes ever increasingly important as we consider how to make the college experience 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.”
