Abstract
The conference session ends and you decide to catch up on some journal reading before the next one begins. Suddenly, another great idea leaps off the pages, pulling you in another direction. Who can I get to help with this? You think of the perfect person and then remember you already asked her to help with an idea that resulted from the research you conducted last semester. How will you get this all done?
Higher education is a profession that values continuous improvement. The Student Learning Imperative tells us, “Student affairs professionals should adapt to their institutional setting promising practices from those fields that contribute to the body of knowledge about student learning and personal development” (p. 121). Likewise, L. Dee Fink challenges classroom educators to shift to engaging and high-energy processes linked to student learning that lasts beyond one class. He also supports moving from pedagogical experimentation to a fully realized framework for improved teaching.
With a plethora of ideas coming from many directions, it is tempting to create new programs or make sweeping changes to mimic those occurring at other institutions or in other fields. The instinct to make wholesale change is strong but presents a number of challenges. Fortunately, Fink suggests, we don't have to alter everything about our work. We can instead focus on small, manageable change that may still have lasting impact.
In this article, we introduce a framework educators can use to help them make this kind of achievable change. A case study illustrates how a small group of individuals on one campus implemented knowledge gained from two fields (qualitative research and justice studies) toward improvement of one service (administrative option hearing). Although the example comes from work in student conduct, we believe that the framework we offer can be applied to other functional areas as well as to course design and classroom instruction. This framework reminds us that at a unit or institutional level we can demonstrate the learning and change we ask our students to engage in—incremental steps, integration into the whole, and reflection.
A Framework for Small Change
Our framework requires thoughtfully moving through four steps and focuses on small-scale change (i.e., the kind that is possible inside a personal sphere of influence). This kind of change can often be accomplished at little or no cost and with few other resources. It also asks for careful and ongoing evaluation to determine if the change is promoting the intended outcomes.
The framework for making small change is both sequential and cyclical and includes the following steps.
Gain new insight.
Audit current services.
Implement change.
Evaluate change.
With small change, one can easily skip any of the aforementioned steps. However, we are suggesting that to achieve success, no matter how small, these incremental steps are essential. One institution's experience reinforces the necessity of attending to all of these steps.
Case Study: Administrative Option Hearing
Our hearing officers are trained to use motivational interviewing techniques to talk with the student during this meeting (for more on motivational interviewing, see David Myers and Eric Rosenberger's feature in this issue of About Campus). Using these techniques, the hearing officer will, for example, ask about a student's major, academic progress, and involvement in campus clubs or organizations. Answers to these questions provide the hearing officer insight into a student's motivations as they may relate to the incident and may guide decisions about sanctions if the student is found responsible for the incident.
The framework for making small change recently guided us as we implemented two additional techniques for educating students during the administrative option hearing. Keys to successful implementation of these techniques from qualitative research (narrative inquiry) and justice studies (restorative justice) were an openness to venture into the work of other fields to gain insight into ways to improve our work, a willingness to evaluate our current practices through the lens of information from other fields, and an openness to evaluate our new approach after implementation.
Narrative Inquiry
According to Sharan B. Merriam, “qualitative researchers are interested in understanding the meaning people have constructed, that is, how people make sense of their world and the experiences they have in the world” (p. 13). This definition speaks to the educator who wishes to understand all facets of the student's perspective. There are many ways to uncover this “constructed meaning” for students using qualitative and mixed-methods research. Narrative inquiry has been particularly helpful for our work in judicial affairs.
Merriam defines narrative inquiry as an approach to qualitative research that focuses on looking into the stories that people tell as a source for understanding the world in which we live. Their stories, or narratives, are first-person accounts that become the data that are analyzed in this approach. Interviewing is the dominant technique used to have someone share his or her narrative. These interviews can be structured, semistructured, or informal, depending on the research questions guiding the study. An informal approach allows a researcher to ask many probing, open-ended questions to understand a phenomenon better, while a more structured interview typically looks at more demographic items (i.e., a census interview). Semistructured interviews provide a blend of structured and open-ended questions and are used often in qualitative settings.
Merriam further describes preparing for the semi-structured interview by creating an interview guide. This guide will have certain specific questions, some examples of open-ended questions, and a list of topics or areas of additional interest for the interviewer. Merriam emphasized that semistructured interviews do not have “rules [that] determine what should go first and what should come later. Much depends upon the study's objectives, the time allotted for the interview, the person being interviewed, and how sensitive some of the questions are” (p. 103).
Michael Quill Patton provides six types of question topics that good interview guides should contain. These include questions related to experience and behavior, opinion and values, feelings, knowledge, sensory issues, and demographics. Patton also encourages interviewers to avoid the use of the word “why.” Merriam suggests that interviewers should avoid multiple-choice, leading, and yes/no questions.
Steinar Kvale elaborates on the interview guide by providing important aspects of setting the stage for the interview, the flow of the actual interview, and the ending of the interview. In setting the stage, the interviewer provides a briefing that establishes the roles of the interviewer and interviewee, discusses the purpose and procedures of the interview, provides informed consent, and clarifies any aspect of the process for the interviewee. The interview flows from an introduction question followed by attentive listening, follow-up and probing questions, and meaning clarification to redirect the interviewee back to the purpose of the interview. The end, or debriefing, includes the interviewer paying attention to the feelings of the participant and providing a summary of how this interview connects to the next steps in the larger process of a research study.
Restorative Justice
Restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of victims and offenders instead of simply punishing the offender. Wrongdoing is treated as a violation of people and relationships. These violations create obligations, and the central obligation is to put right the wrongs by engaging all who have been affected by the specific incident. Howard Zehr refers to four concepts (harms, needs, obligations, and engagement) as the pillars of restorative justice. Zehr also highlights three underlying values of the practice, which are respect, responsibility, and relationships.
While the term restorative justice is relatively new, the practice and philosophies of this field of work parallel traditional justice methods of indigenous populations around the world. In these approaches to conflict, many members of the community are brought together to address a problem. Laura Mirsky points out that “in First Nation and Native American justice, healing, along with reintegrating individuals into their community, is paramount. Native justice involves bringing together victims, offenders and their supporters to resolve a problem In the Native worldview there is a deep connection between justice and spirituality; harmony and balance are essential to both” (p. 1).
The modern field of restorative justice came into practice in the 1970s in response to situations that did not always fully address the needs of the victims and/ or community. Cases that had gone through a criminal court process had left victims, or others involved in the incident, with questions or fears. While restorative justice is often presented as an alternative to the legal system, Allan MacRae and Howard Zehr suggest that it does not have to be a separate process. In New Zealand, for example, a form of restorative justice called Family Group Conferencing is used as the default process for their juvenile justice system for the entire country.
In an ideal restorative justice process, the victim, offender, members of the community, and support people are all brought together for dialogue. The conversation provides opportunities to ask and answer questions, express feelings, tell stories, express regret, and work toward mutually acceptable outcomes. Ultimately, this helps foster a better understanding of others and an awareness of how one's actions affect others. The purpose is to understand the underlying causes and the effects on those who have been harmed, and to address all parties’ needs for healing and reparation.
Zehr states that “restorative justice seeks to provide an alternative framework or lens for thinking about crime and justice” (p. 32). This lens focuses us on the harm to and needs of victims, the community, and the offender, as well as emphasizing the obligations of the offender and community to address the identified harms and attempt to meet the identified needs. Restorative justice practitioners ask questions differently in order to gain a better understanding of an event and its consequences for all parties. For example, instead of asking, “What law was broken?” one with a restorative justice lens would ask, “Who was harmed?”
Audit Current Services
For our office, narrative inquiry and restorative justice are directly related to the administrative option hearings we hold with students. We discovered that narrative inquiry could apply to the way we train our hearing officers as well as to the actual interview portion of the hearing. The restorative justice lens could be applied to the way we ask questions of students in hearings and to how we make decisions about appropriate sanctions for those students. In making decisions about behavior, it is our belief that we must understand the individual's needs and balance those with the needs of the community.
In looking at our hearing process through the narrative inquiry lens, we found that we were implementing a semistructured interview to understand the student's perspective of the event and to gain insight into the student's motivations as they may be related to the incident. During the audit, we looked for elements of a good semistructured interview and found many of them already in the current process.
We had originally chosen a semistructured interview format since our purpose was to acquire certain required information from the student (i.e., verification of contact information) as well as provide the opportunity for the student to tell his or her own unique narrative about the policy violation in question. Our interview guide already had open-ended questions to elicit conversation as well as questions that covered four of Patton's six topical areas (experience and behavior, opinion and values, knowledge, and background demographics). The guide did not contain multiple-choice, leading, or yes/no questions that should be avoided. In addition, from a training standpoint, new interviewers were taught about all of the good types of questions and ones to avoid and what the goal of the interview (i.e., hearing) was, and were given time to observe and practice with experienced interviewers.
While the audit revealed that many of the tenets of narrative inquiry were represented in our process, we did identify areas of questioning that were missing and the need for additional training on interviewing techniques for our hearing officers.
The restorative justice lens prompted us to ask if our process included questions such as “What happened?” “What effect did this have on the community?” “What harm did the actions cause?” and “What can the student do to address and repair some of the identified harms?” We asked ourselves to what extent have we encouraged engagement with harmed parties and the community as a whole? We essentially looked for the ways our process demonstrated the pillars (harms, needs, obligation, and engagement) and values (respect, responsibility, and relationships) of restorative justice.
Through our audit process we were able to find many ways in which we did exhibit the foundations of restorative justice, as well as some areas where our program could improve. We found that during our hearings we discuss offenders’ harms to themselves. Our processes allowed space for discussion of the students’ needs and what they needed to learn to prevent future violations. While the process was already restorative in nature, we found that it was also mainly offender-focused. There was limited discussion of the victim and community and, therefore, limited focus on the harms to the campus as a whole caused by the incident.
After conducting an audit of our current practice from each of these new perspectives, we were able to identify elements within the hearing process and the way we prepare our hearing officers to conduct these hearings that could be influenced by this new knowledge. Rather than create an entirely new process called a “restorative hearing” or a “narrative inquiry hearing,” we chose the much easier, and we think more productive, route of tweaking our current service.
Narrative Inquiry
From a narrative inquiry perspective, there was a lot already in place with our semistructured interviews with students that was modeling the approach correctly. However, a few adjustments were needed to adhere more solidly to the more effective techniques. While our interview guide provided questions in four of the six topical areas suggested by Patton, it was missing the sensory and feeling questions. Even though we trained hearing officers to ask students about their feelings and perceptions of the event, we did not have any formal questions related to this. Therefore, we adapted the guide to include questions such as “What thoughts or feelings do you have after hearing this report?” and “Please describe your perspective on this incident.”
Next, we examined the training provided for new interviewers. This was the area that benefited the most from our learning. In looking at the materials we provided interviewers for the guide, we solely gave them the paperwork they would actually use when conducting the interview. To implement our learning about the flow of the interview and rapport building, we created a more extensive script for the interview. For example, the script begins with a section called “Welcome/Check In” that instructs them to thank students for coming to the hearing and to ask students about their day in order to build rapport. The third section in the script is called “Relationship Building” and is the section where the interviewer is instructed to get to know the student by verifying contact information and going over the process and rights to ensure understanding. The fourth section is actually called “Narrative Sharing” and is described as the opportunity to use all the information they have learned about questions, flow of the interview, and rapport to gain insight into the student's narrative. New interviewers now have a three-page document on the purpose of the process and suggestions for what to discuss at each phase of the interview.
Restorative Justice
To build on the restorative nature of our work, we looked at the questions we tend to ask during the administrative option hearing, as well as the language we encourage our staff to use during this process. As stated earlier, during the administrative option hearing process we were already doing well in meeting the needs of the offender. By encouraging students to share their perspective and their feelings regarding the incident in question, as well as asking questions to gain a better understanding of the student's college life, we are able to match the student with a sanctioned program that provides opportunities for learning.
As we implemented more of a restorative justice framework, we asked questions that encouraged the student to consider more of the victim's and community's needs as well. We added the following prompts to the guide for hearing officers. “Talk to me about your interaction with the other party (police officer, RA, etc.) during and after the incident. What do you think you and they were feeling or thinking at the time of the incident? What do you think they have thought and felt since?”
By asking these questions, the hearing officers provide opportunities for the students to think differently about the incident, to provide someone else's perspective, and, perhaps, to help the student better understand the reason for the charges and the process.
In addition to questions added to the guide for the hearing process, we trained our hearing officers on additional language to use during their hearings. To help explore issues of safety, as well as the possibility for future engagement and dialogue, we encourage hearing officers to ask questions such as “What do you think your future relationship will be like [with the other party involved in the incident] and what would you like the relationship to look like?” or “If you had an opportunity to talk with the other party, what might you want to say or hope to learn?” By asking these questions, hearing officers provide opportunities for the student to discuss possible ways to repair the harm, helping students at times to feel more empowered to take responsibility and have a dialogue with the affected parties, either by themselves or with the help of a third party.
Evaluate Change
Evaluation is an ongoing process. The changes described above were made in the summer of 2011 and piloted in the training and hearings during the academic year that followed. Initial informal responses to the changes from hearing officers were positive. Hearing officers have reported richer discussions with students and a sense that they are better able to identify which sanction will have the greatest impact for the student. One hearing officer stated that, by using slightly different language learned in the new training, students answered questions in ways he had wished they had before.
Additional formal evaluation was scheduled for implementation in the summer of 2012. As we review the results and consider other areas of need revealed by the audits we conducted, we may choose to make additional changes in the future.