Welcome to the 2022 Division J Blog

Hey, y’all!

I’m Alex C. Lange (they/them). I am the new Editor for the AERA Division J blog. I am grateful to Dr. Jenny Lee for extending this opportunity to me, and I am jazzed for the chance to shape some generative scholarly dialogue through this blog. I am also delighted to have Martha Sesteaga (she/her/ella) join me as a Managing Editor for the blog.

A bit about me: I am an assistant professor of higher education at Colorado State University-Ft. Collins, which resides on the lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations and peoples. I teach students in our Higher Education Leadership Ph.D. program. My research interests include student learning and development, college teaching, and LGBTQ+ studies in higher education. I often write about these topics, especially teaching and learning, through my blog on Medium (Medium link).

What do I hope to do with this blog? So glad you asked! The blog will focus on commentaries and reflections from scholars. I hope to curate relevant commentaries and reflections to help Division J members think about theory, research, and praxis in ways that push and challenge current ways of studying and imagining postsecondary education.

And most importantly, I want to model what it looks like to engage with others’ ideas in generous and generative ways. I notice that I listen to other people’s ideas but only engage those ideas on my terms. How does this relate to my research interest? Did they look at this thing that I am interested in? Those questions are important, and they primarily benefit my thinking. What I hope to create is a system of call and response, where someone posts an original commentary or reflection, and then another scholar responds to it. This second writer would reflect on what resonated, offer potential further ways of thinking about the topic, suggest complementary ideas or approaches, and discuss how their work and interests may (or may not) be tied to this kind of thinking.

I am committed to trying this idea out for my first year as Editor. This idea could be excellent or not so excellent. Regardless, we will reassess the experiment’s idea a year from now. Posts will be 800 – 1200 words, not including references. If you are interested in this idea or have a commentary/reflection in mind, please reach out at a.c.lange@colostate.edu.

Also, refer to the submission guidelines for more details (Guidelines Link).

Thanks for reading!

Looking: Using Proximity-Based Dating Apps like Grindr and Scruff for Participant Recruitment in Education and the Social Sciences

Nick Havey Looking (for research participants)? Consider “the Apps” If you’re familiar with the HBO series Looking, which explores very white queer life in San Francisco, or have used a dating app in the last 10 years, you might know “looking” as a one-word interrogative that says a lot. It mostly is meant as a lazy (or efficient) way of asking another user if they’re interested in casual sex, but you might be “looking” for research participants! Having a baseline understanding of how dating apps work is prerequisite for using them for research purposes, as understanding terms like “looking” and app-based norms can help researchers navigate confusing virtual spaces and build trust and rapport with potential participants. I have used proximity-based dating apps as recruitment sites for two different research projects. One considers the state of queer sexual education and how queer collegians are responding to sex educations that were not inclusive of their experiences or desi...

Black Thriving and Flourishing in Higher Education: The Imperative for a New Research Agenda

By Agyemang Amofa Prempeh & Dr. Sydney Freeman, Jr. Black people continue to face significant challenges in higher education. The Underrepresentation of Black students in colleges and universities and a lack of Black faculty and administrators highlight the pressing need for targeted initiatives to foster Black thriving and flourishing on campuses. While valuable research has been conducted on concepts such as Black joy and a sense of belonging, a comprehensive research agenda on Black thriving and flourishing in higher education is still lacking. A research agenda on Black thriving and flourishing will provide a comprehensive approach to correct the existing disparities faced by Black students, faculty, staff, and administrators at predominately White institutions (PWIs). Such a research agenda may also lead to developing strategies that, when implemented, facilitate higher education campuses where Black people can reach their fullest potential academically and professio...

A Focus on Rural Student Strengths: Dismantling Deficit Thinking and Language on Rurality in Higher Education

Ty C. McNamee, Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi In recent years, issues that for decades have plagued rural areas have been front-and-center in mainstream news outlets, such as high rates of poverty, declining population, fewer white-collar job opportunities, and comparatively lower levels of educational success. Such issues impact rural students’ higher education attainment, a topic that news media have appeared to notice with headlines such as: “ Colleges Discover the Rural Student ,” “ The Rural Higher-Education Crisis ,” and “ For Colleges, A Rural Reckoning .” Each piece highlighted rural youth holding some of the lowest college attainment rates in the country , compared to other geographic locales. These pieces put rural students at the forefront of higher education conversations for the first time in decades. Unfortunately, much of the discussion surrounding rural Americans frames their lives and educational experiences as deficient. In turn, my co-research...

Studying Development in a Time of Death - Response Piece

Alex C. Lange, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Higher education, School of Education at Colorado State University The night I began to outline the first chapter of my (original) dissertation [1] focused on transgender students’ self-authorship capacities, something nagged at my spirit. A cowlick that would not rest comfortably. A small splinter, not even a millimeter deep in my hand. As I stared at my poster board, trying to make sense of what bothered me, cold water splashed me in the face. I grabbed a sticky note and a metallic-colored marker and wrote down the phrase to make sure I would not run away from it: What does it mean to study student development in a time of death, division, and disease? When I wrote that note on March 25, 2020, I thought of the Black and Latina trans women and transfeminine people, who are exponentially subject to violence compared to their cisgender counterparts and their transmasculine and non-binary siblings. The trans communit...

On the Imperative of Differentiating Between Student Experiences, Learning, and Development in the Third Wave of Development Research

Antonio Duran, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Higher and Postsecondary Education, Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation, Arizona State University The first time I took a college student development class was as an undergraduate student at New York University as they were piloting a course titled, “Who are You and Why are You Here?” I remember feelings of excitement as I learned about the fact that there were theories describing how college students explored formative questions of the self and of their identities as they moved through life, theories that would inform one’s work in higher education settings. This enthusiasm carried over as I took another student development theory class as a master’s student at Miami University where I deepened my understanding of the development journeys of those in college. And yet, as I got deeper into this research, the questions I had grew (probably a good sign of my own learning, and perhaps...

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