by Dr. Gina Ann Garcia and Leah Jackson
BCFC/Shutterstock
In part two of this Q&A, HigherEdJobs speaks with Dr. Gina Ann Garcia, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Education who focuses on issues of equity and justice in higher education, shares more ways to center and truly serve students at Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs). Read part one here.
Leah Jackson, HigherEdJobs: A recent report you co-authored discusses the benefits of the requirement for all California Community Colleges to “designate a coordinator and space on campus to provide support for students’ basic needs, which include food, housing, clothing, transportation, personal hygiene, baby products, childcare, technology, and mental health services.” Data showed that 48% of students utilizing these services were Latine/x, so it seems this policy is one that other states could put in place for HSIs in order to increase their servingness. What other policies could help?
Dr. Gina Ann Garcia: I do want to acknowledge that’s California. That report is for California Hispanic-Serving Community Colleges. And I say that because, connecting back to my book, I’m very clear that the state context matters.
Those states are affecting whether or how much you can enhance servingness. California, for me, is an HSI-friendly state. We can do servingness in collaboration with California policies. Texas — not so much. Florida — absolutely not. Every state has a different context.
So, in a California context, the basic needs policy — that’s a newer one. One that I am seeing a lot of work around is the guided pathways. California implemented guided pathways at least five years ago.
The community colleges all launched these guided pathways models, and the really savvy ones are now using their HSI funding and writing HSI grants to continue that work. And I say really savvy because you have to be really savvy to be able to understand that one mandate can connect to another — one funding stream can connect to another. They don’t have to live without any sort of connection. So, I’ve seen that happening a lot more with some campuses elevating their Guided Pathways framework with HSI funding.
With that report, I wrote that section because I am so fascinated by it. I think that’s what’s going to advance HSIs — being able to work with the policies and funding streams that are already in place.
Now the flip side, to be fair, Texas has a lot of HSIs. So, when a state like Texas says you can’t do DEI work, but they don’t (and can’t) say you can’t do HSI work because HSI is a federal designation, then campuses are naturally leaning more into HSI work because they can’t do DEI work.
I talked about that in a recent blog post. You can do DEI work without calling it DEI, so they’re changing office names, position names, anything that had “DEI” in it because of the state’s attack on DEI, which is unfortunate, but it’s the same sort of ideas, how do you work within the policies? How do you work within the state framing? California, in this case, being one that would enhance servingness like the basic needs or guided pathways policy, Texas being one that is hindering it. So, you have to work differently within them, but that’s really the overall messaging of that is like — how are we going to work with policies to do HSI work?
Jackson: There is definitely a distinction there. Is there any message you can share to encourage people in those states where it is more challenging?
Garcia: I don’t have all the answers because I’m not in that situation. It’s an intense situation. Now what I’m seeing is that’s also more intense in state-funded institutions and/or more conservative institutions, because I still do deal with Texas. Private institutions have a little more leeway. They tend to be a little bit less affected by those sort of state decisions. So, I think it is campus by campus, and some campuses are more liberal and some are more conservative, particularly in Texas. So it really is the people who are going to allow and continue this work.
What I wrote about it on my blog is that DEI work can be done without calling it DEI work. I say it’s a commitment. If you’re committed to equity, you’re committed to equity. If you’re equity-minded, you’re equity-minded. If you’re HIS-conscious, you’re HIS-conscious. You can call it whatever you want. You can call it the most basic thing, and it is still diversity work. I think symbolically it hurts because we need symbolically to know that there are spaces. Symbolically, students still want cultural centers — even at HSIs, even when they’re the largest group, 50, 60, 70%, — they still want a cultural center. They want that space that they know is theirs. So, symbolically, it does matter to people. But the embodiment of equity-mindedness and commitment to diversity is something that you have within. We’re going to still advance the work either way.
Jackson: Both your report and recent book reference engaging families. Why is this so important for Latine/x student success?
Garcia: It’s cultural. That’s a big piece. I think a lot of people are engaged with their families — and actually, COVID showed us that students are not actually going as far away to college because they want stay close to home. Latinx students were already doing that. That was already in the data that Latine students are not going to college far from home.
They’re very cultural. They’re very family-oriented. And it’s a cultural thing to say that we can expect students to disconnect from their families. It also pushes back on an old-school Tinto sort of approach to engagement and integration, right? A Tinto model and a really early model of student success said that students needed to disconnect from their communities, their home environments, and their people in order to be fully successful in college.
That’s the assimilation approach. You need to leave everything at home. [My model] is the opposite of the assimilation model and the integration model. It’s saying, “absolutely not. What if we actually brought families to campus? What if we engaged families also? What if families got to be a part of this experience?”
In reality, campuses are doing that a lot anyway. We’ve seen an emergence of family engagement anyway. And, in this case, linguistically relevant engagement is also important.
Jackson: What role does data play in servingness? And how can colleges start to build this infrastructure?
Garcia: I think data-driven decision-making is really important. I think it’s an equity approach. We need data to show us where the inequities are. The reality is a lot of campuses don’t have the ability to do data. They don’t have good data management and data systems — and I’m thinking about community colleges in particular and under-resourced institutions.
However, the reality is on campuses that I spent a lot of time with, data is not what we focus on. We are focusing on structures. We are focusing on “what does it look like to engage families?” We are focusing on the creation of centers, liberatory education, and designing murals — because people feel that murals matter and they do. The space matters. So we’re focusing from a typology perspective. There are two dimensions to the typology. Outcomes is one, and culture and structures is the other.
Most people are focusing on the culture and the structures. How do we change the culture? How do we change the environment? The data will come, right? But they aren’t what actually needs to change on the campus. It is the structure. So, I think data is important, but I don’t think it should stop the work.
If you don’t have good data management structures, yes, let’s work on that as well, because it does matter when it comes to making equity decisions — particularly when people are saying, “why aren’t we serving all students?”
We can then say, well, the data show that students of color– debate, break it out by however you want, sometimes it’s by gender or by income — are struggling more. We need the data for that perspective.
Jackson: It is National Hispanic American Heritage Month. The HSI division of the Department of Education is encouraging faculty, staff, students, and leaders to share their stories on social media with various hashtags. Will you be participating? And how can institutions use this to promote and encourage true servingness?
Garcia: I hadn’t seen that in particular, but I think it gets back to my comment about us not being relics of the past. I have seen other folks who are elevating education folks who identify as Hispanic or Latinx and that’s exciting to me. We have people who are currently doing a lot of really great things. We’re not relics of the past. I think it is important that we think about that. Students do want to see people of color. I think the flip side of that is tokenizing of folks, right? Allowing every day, all types of people to be elevated is important. So yes, I think it’s a good idea.
