Everything’s Political – College Students and the Need for Problem-Solving Education

Crossposted at Politics for the Common Good.

Rarely do I intentionally blend my graduate school lessons learned with the material discussed in this blog. I'm starting to realize that's a mistake.

As a graduate student in a Student Affairs in Higher Education program, I endeavor to eventually work on a college campus, encouraging students to mind their civic habits and responsibilities, while simultaneously teaching them about life throughout that journey. In order to fulfill graduation requirements for my masters program, I must work in an office on campus for twelve hours a week; such an experience usually involves creating some form of original work. In working with a leadership institute on campus, I have managed to perform my own bricolage, mixing two seemingly disparate elements together: politics and education. I have organized a series of discussions in which students having no knowledge of politics can contribute to a conversation, along with the political elite on campus, on what politics means to them. I guess one could metaphorically associate this effort with the training wheels needed for what is hopefully a life-long career marrying civic responsibility with education.

My motivation for pursuing what can be an all-too-frustrating task was initially selfish. I was a political science major. I didn't have the guts to denigrate characters in political attack ads or the logical skills needed to practice the law. I liked living and working on a college campus as an undergraduate. Voila. Student affairs allows me to straddle the line between politics and education.

But, as many a graduate student has come to know, this line I speak of is fictional. That's the lesson I have learned this year, perhaps nowhere better than these dialogues. Navigating a curriculum rooted in social constructivism, understanding that there is never a "right" answer, but merely socially-constructed knowledge, has sharpened my realization that politics is in everything we do. Yes, it's in presidential elections every four years. It is in the partisan bickering and strategizing that goes on in Washington. But it is also in fraternity and sorority elections. It is in where you get your coffee in the morning. It is in the choice of news you wish to consume. Politics is everywhere.

My experience with undergraduates at my former place of employment and my current institution reveals to me that I was not alone in seeing the line. Politics can be compartmentalized into a convenient box. Students associate politics with Washington DC, voting, Congress, and the like. In one of our political dialogues this month, one of the students expressed boredom with politics. "Whenever I see politics on TV I change the channel," they explained. "It's just not fun. I don't really want to get involved." Yet, the act of channelsurfing itself is political. They did get involved in their decision to forego public affairs programming.

Unfortunately that involvement was unseen, and small in magnitude. I am recognizing that while student affairs practitioners and scholars spend quite a bit of time on social justice education, we tend to spend less time on civic education, developing the set of tools needed to engage in one's community. While service-learning and voter registration drives have been trendy on college campuses over the last two presidential elections, engagement in local and state politics continues to suffer. It's no wonder students associate politics with dysfunctional Washington.

If we were to take a problem-solving approach in our student affairs practice, we might make some headway.

Embracing a problem-solving approach to learning would be appropriate if we seek to rid higher education of the “mind/body split” that compartmentalizes intellectual discussion from one’s public actions (hooks, 1994, p. 16). A problem-solving approach would require the construction of deep and sustainable relationships between student affairs educators and the rest of the faculty, staff, and administration; a problem-solving-based model would necessitate an emphasis on the common good, meaning that students would see departments and offices role model this approach by collectivizing agendas as much as possible and placing the institution’s mission (which would ideally emphasize problem-solving) above their own. In addition to the construction of strong relationships, a problem-solving approach would encourage student affairs educators to create Freirian relationships with students; with an emphasis on community problem-solving, student/teacher and teacher/student “learn from and teach each other” – “doing ‘with’ rather than ‘for’” (as cited in Manning 1994, p. 95).

In this model, collaboration is the name of the game. The common good is at the heart of this effort, with problems uniting academic disciplines, student affairs staff, and students as opposed to egos, departments that are siloed off from each other, and disengaged students. To get here, we do need to re-examine our social justice efforts.

In order to face society’s problems today, our students must first begin the process of understanding and exploring their identity, their values, and how they view difference. In addition, the educational nature of problem-solving demands from students the ability to see an issue from another’s perspective. Following these tough lessons, students also need to learn about power and privilege, the source of many of the problems our students will be trying to solve.

Politics does not have to be perceived as a bad thing. The derivation of the word -- “polis” is the Greek word for a city or state, thus “politikos,” or politics, means affairs/issues of the city/state -- is hardly negative. However, college students unfortunately associate the broken system currently in Washington with politics; consequently, "politics" gets a bad name and other, more positive opportunities for political engagement become invisible. With just a bit more effort, student affairs practitioners can reveal the other side of politics -- civil conversations, learning from others, changing their realities to help themselves and others -- and align programs with our institutions' "citizenship"-laden mission statements.