Becoming Professorial: Graduate Student Socialization and the Reproduction of Inequality.

socialization;graduate education;racism;race in higher education;faculty preparation;graduate students;Education;Social Sciences;Higher Education

Fernandez, Sonia DeLucaO ; ; Connor, Carla ;

University of Michigan

关键词: socialization;    graduate education;    racism;    race in higher education;    faculty preparation;    graduate students;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Higher Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/111556/sddeluca_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Although African Americans and Latino/as comprised almost 30 percent of the U.S. population, in 2010 they were awarded fewer than nine percent of the doctoral degrees. The consequences of this underrepresentation include a corresponding lack of faculty of color, intellectual vigor, and failure to capitalize on the nation’s intellectual resources.I conducted semi-structured interviews with 37 faculty and graduate students in psychology at two institutions in the United States. I investigated graduate student socialization to faculty careers, and analyzed how students learned to be graduate students and faculty members, how faculty members engaged graduate student socialization, and how racism impacted graduate student socialization. The socialization messages that graduate students received regarding what was required to become successful academics were delivered by the weak and strong forms of the hidden curriculum. In this study, the weak forms of the hidden curriculum I discovered included research, teaching, networking, commitment, public speaking, navigating politics, and flexibility. Factoring much more prominently into the lives of this study’s participants, were the strong forms of the hidden curriculum. Strong forms of the hidden curriculum included confusion, submission and conformity, competition, masking, and disconnection. Socialization messages, regulated by the hidden curriculum and supported by departmental norms, were received by graduate students by watching faculty, interacting with faculty, interacting with peers, department communications, and with the absence of interaction and feedback.There are specific ways in which the hidden curriculum serves to reproduce inequality, and specifically racism. As a result of the reproductive effects of the strong forms of the hidden curriculum, I recommended that the problems of underrepresentation and attrition in graduate education and the professoriate be addressed with an analytical approach that centers the extent to which norms and structures reflect the goals of graduate education, and reproduce inequity.Further study of the norms in graduate education, the mechanisms that support the operationalization of the norms, and the purposes of the norms, is warranted.