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Giving Them Grace
RAs and IAs with historically marginalized
social identities were challenged by the responsibility
of educating others while personally experiencing
their own feelings of oppression.
Recognition of Residents' Developmental Differences
In addition to differences in their own abilities to facilitate social justice interactions in
the RCM, the participants recognized differences (based on their previous exposure to
the topics) in their residents' desire and ability to engage in social justice learning in
the residential setting. Thinking about social justice from a learning perspective, participants
at all sites perceived that many residents simply lacked an awareness of and
exposure to diversity. This group of unengaged learners either demonstrated a passive
lack of desire to engage in diversity learning or were actively resistant to learning. The
RAs also described two other groups: residents who lacked knowledge but expressed
some openness to learning and those who were both eager to continue learning about
social justice and prepared to begin advocating for change and disrupting issues of
inequity on their campus. The participants discussed how these different groups of
residents impacted their experiences in delivering the social justice curriculum.
Unengaged learners. For RAs and IAs who took their role with the social justice
curriculum seriously, the unengaged learners were the most challenging because they
seemed to lack a sense of awareness, comfortability, courage, or interest. As David stated,
In general, especially with [the social justice] conversation, it has more or less met
my expectations that my residents don't really want to talk about it. They don't think
they have privilege; they don't understand why we have to do this.
For Tad, the difficulties arose due to residents' lack of exposure to diversity topics.
The residents on my floor, they come from backgrounds where they probably didn't have
much outside exposure to certain groups of people. So, trying to make sure that they keep
the environment safe for groups of people they may have not interacted with in the past
is a conversation I've had. And it's kind of difficult just to have that conversation. Because
they just haven't seen certain things about the world before besides on the internet.
Ultimately, some RAs came to recognize differences in residents' developmental
readiness to engage with social justice learning and found ways to incorporate these
differences into their approaches. Jumbo shared,
And I think some of the challenging parts is we can't expect all of our residents to have the
same amount of knowledge as we do because we're trained to have this knowledge. And
all these people have come from different places, and so we don't necessarily know their
educational background and also sometimes you will get frustrated. Because we can't
change their minds, or we can't make them believe something that they don't believe
because they're all adults now.
Volume 51, No. 1 * 2024 25

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