Square Pegs and Round Holes: Alternative Approaches to Diverse College Student Development Theory

Product Description

Developing alternative student development frameworks and models, this groundbreaking book provides student affairs practitioners, as well as faculty, with illuminating perspectives and viable approaches for understanding the development of today’s diverse student populations, and for building the foundation for their academic success and self-authorship.

With the increasing number of adult working students, minoritized, multiracial, LGTBQ, and first-generation students, this book offers readers vital insights into –and ways to interrogate– existing practice, and develop relevant responses to the needs of these populations.

Building on and critiquing the past frameworks, and integrating the insights of contemporary scholarship on student development, the contributors collectively put forward a robust theoretical and methodological foundation for this work, using Critical Race Theory as their central frame. CRT allows chapter authors to situate race related encounters at the center of their proposed alternative framework or model, and deconstruct and challenge commonly held assumptions about diverse college student development.

In the tradition of CRT, each author offers an alternative model or framework that can be applied to the diverse population upon which the chapter is framed, prompting readers to address such questions as:

• Who are our college students?
• What set of experiences do our students bring to the higher education context?
• What role have their environments/contexts (i.e. home, p-12, community, family, peer groups, mentors) played in our student’s lives?
• What impact have intervening variables (i.e. race, oppression, power) hadon their experiences?
• What strategies do they use to overcome developmental obstacles?
• How do they define success, and how they know they have achieved it ?

By laying bare the experiences of these diverse college students that inform this volume’s “alternative” frameworks this book contests that notion that they constitute square pegs that must fit
into the round holes of traditional frameworks.

Review

“Square Pegs Round Holes is an important asset to the field of higher education and student affairs. Uniquely centering critical race theory as the organizing frame for alternative student development models and perspectives presented, the book empowers practitioners and faculty with updated tools for understanding the intersectional, contextualized, and diverse identities of today’s college students. While this book thoughtfully critiques the shortcomings of traditional theories, it does not reject them entirely. Rather, it builds new space for emerging voices that tell a more complete story about the complexity of student experiences and identities.”–Alexa Wesley, Associate Director for Research and Policy “NASPA – Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education”

“Hallowed past practices in the field of student development have often failed to engender student empowerment and success among the diverse students that universities serve. Help has finally arrived in the form of Square Pegs and Round Holes which offers invaluable perspectives on how to reframe and enhance narrow and outmoded practices in this field.”–Ruth J. Simmons, President “Prairie View A&M University”

“I have taught Student Development Theory for the majority of my faculty career. For a long time, I had to teach using theoretical frameworks that are outdated and not representative of the diverse student populations on college campuses today. Square Pegs and Round Holes provides a much-needed expansion of theories and perspectives to understand better the lives and experiences of the multiple, intersectional, and complex populations left out of traditional student development theories. As an instructor, I no longer have to rely solely on theories void of diverse perspectives. Students entering higher education preparation programs desire to learn more about diverse populatio