Author: Aaron

My Expectations

I consider myself an ally and advocate. But is that enough? What am I doing to work toward a community that is shaped to equitably meet everyone’s needs? I participate as much as possible in the educational process to make people aware of the overarching injustice within society. I often leave presentations or discussions that I facilitate feeling a little disheartened. I expect to somehow witness the same fireworks and passion that I feel when learning about social justice. That just doesn’t happen.

I need to recognize and adopt reasonable expectations. The probability that someone’s entire perspective is going to change in an hour long presentation is very slim. I need to make sure that I understand that any presentation I give or discussion I lead opens up eyes a little bit. These presentations are getting feet in peoples’ doors. They open minds a little for future considerations. They are the small change that can snowball into huge change in the future.

I need to understand that. The world can’t change in one day, no matter how much I will it to. We all know that life isn’t fair, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t strive for it to be that way.

A letter to a Senator

A letter that I wrote to my State Senator:

Senator Stein,

My name is Aaron Hood and I am a graduate student at North Carolina State University. I’m writing you because North Carolina prohibits gay couples from marrying. I find it disheartening that two people who love each other are barred from entering into a legal relationship that our society has chosen to define as the ultimate commitment that one person can make to another. Marriage has become the way in which many relationships are defined in North Carolina and our fellow citizens who identify as gay or lesbian cannot define their relationship using this societal norm.

Several people who are my colleagues are prevented from being married to their partner for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with their love for each other. These issues that stand in the way of gay marriage are simply issues of ignorance and fear. People fear what they do not know. What they think they  don’t know is how gay relationships work. I think that there is an assumption that somehow gay couples are vastly different from heterosexual couples, but the emotions that guide gay couples are exactly the same. They are emotions of passion and love that make people want to commit to sharing an entire lifetime with another person. Amid the issues within our global community, I can see no reason why demonstrations of passion and love should be prohibited or even limited.

I’m not a lawyer; I do not know the steps, logistically and politically, that it will take to repeal any laws that ban same sex marriage or what it would take a gain support for same sex marriage. However, I ask that you consider working to encourage love among our fellow North Carolinians during your time in the state senate. Because same sex marriage truly has everything to do with love, anything else is just conjecture.

Sincerely,

Aaron Hood

Presentation Ground Rules

I did a program session at a conference on October 30, 2010 and before I started the session, I realized that I needed to set some ground rules for the presentation. This is not something that I’ve always done and I think it really helped out with my presentation because the participants understood immediately that we were there to learn. I created these in the context of a presentation that discussed social justice, but I think they are applicable to any presentation.

The first ground rule was that the session is intended to be educational. We were all there to make learn something new together, and I emphasized that meant me as well. There is always a possibility that someone in the audience has some insight into whatever topic that I’m presenting that I haven’t heard yet.

The next was to think about the concepts rather than analyzing and attacking every detail within them. The “that’s not what we’re talking about” syndrome can seriously derail a conversation and do far more damage than good.

Being respectful is important. I focused on the attendees being respectful to each other. There is no need for name calling or swearing in an educational environment. If we got to that point, there probably would not be much learning going on any more.

Keeping the sensitive conversation in the room is also important as an attempt to help people feel comfortable sharing information that they may not otherwise share.

The last ground rule that I laid out was the idea of the “parking lot.” The parking lot is a technique that one of my professors uses to highlight an educational moment without interrupting the person who is sharing. The item that is put in the parking lot is written on the board and revisited later so that my professor can highlight the educational moment. It’s been enlightening throughout the course of the semester to see what we can learn in addition to what is already on the syllabus through the parking lot concept.

Some other ground rules that I plan to work in for later presentation is that people should respond to the person who spoke before them and validate what they said for better development of trust within the group. I also want to focus on the concept of the group being a community to further enhance the respect and trust aspects of my ground rules.

What ground rules do you use in your presentations? Is there anything that you’d add to mine?

Social Justice Leadership

I presented a programming session at SAACURH 2010, the resources that I used are outlined here as is a PDF copy of the presentation.

My presentation basically talked about working toward understanding social change and social justice and applying those concepts to residence hall leadership. Janet Helms and Keith Edwards both imply that one can use their privileges and power to act against the systems that provide privileges that everyone deserves and confers dominance that no one deserves.

Presentation

Sources

I’m glad I worked on Columbus Day

One of my RAs mentioned to me that he wished Fall Break was longer and stated that he wished we had Columbus Day off like the banks do. I said we don’t get Veteren’s Day off either and that is a holiday that I’d be more willing to celebrate.

Celebrating Columbus Day means celebrating the death and genocide of the Native Americans, dubbed “Indians” by Columbus.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-three, Columbus stole all he could see. (Loewen, 2007, pp. 31)

The heroification of Columbus in American culture is also troubling for a number of reasons. He is lauded as the discoverer of the new world, but that marginalizes the people who came to North America prior to 1492. A chart of suspected explorers who came to America prior to Columbus can be found here on Google Books.

On the whole, I think that we need to examine whether America should continue to celebrate and honor the actions of Christopher Columbus. Let’s Reconsider Columbus Day.

Reference

Loewen, J. W. (2007) Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster.

#sachat – Stay Connected!

Working in student affairs is a great experience for professional development because there is so much of it. There a dozens of professional associations for the different functional areas that intentionally think of ways to engage their membership in discussions of current events and developments within the field.

Mostly, Student Affairs Educators think of conferences as the major way to gain professional development and I think conferences are fantastic! I always connect with the field in a way that energizes me and teaches me something new about how I can further my work. I also think that it’s hard to stay connected to the material that you learn because you come back to catch-up work at the office. It’s also expensive to travel to conferences. So, #sachat is an easy way to stay connected to the field and the knowledge that is being developed in an exciting way.

#sachat is held every Thursday at both 1 PM eastern time and 7 PM eastern time. There are also a few splinter groups for doctoral students (#sadoc) and masters students (#sagrad).

These conversations are always awesome because of the knowledge, both scholarly and practical, that people bring to the conversation. It’s also a great way to network across the field to understand how different institutions function. While I’m not the most active person in these chats, I’m definitely a lurker, I always get something out of them because of the knowledge that the conversation revolves around.

#sachat is a great alternative to staying connected to the field and learning in-between conferences and as an free alternative to conferences. So I suggest them to anyone who is looking for little something extra in their own development. And you can learn more at thesabloggers.org

P.S. They also celebrated their 1st anniversary a few weeks ago.

“Post-racial” America is a farce

This is an assignment for my Culture in Counseling Class.

The National Federation of Republican Women held a meeting in Charleston, SC  and Glenn McConnell, a white American Republican State Senator from South Carolina posed in confederate army attire with two African American people dressed as slaves. His place of power within South Carolina juxtaposed with the African Americans’ place of service highlights America’s deception of progress. We’ve got a black man from Chicago in the White House, but there are still black people dressed as slaves serving white men and women in the south. Congratulations America, we’ve fixed racism!

An immediate sense of outrage bubbled to the forefront of my consciousness when I first saw this picture. I can’t believe that a national organization around one of our two major political parties thought it was appropriate to celebrate what they call “A Southern Experience” and what I call a celebration of slavery. As a society, we need to recognize and move past the notion that racism is no longer a problem. This photo is explicit evidence that this is not the “post-racial” society that some claim it is. Understanding that the struggle is on-going is the first step to continuing the conversation and working towards real progress.

Life, Hijacked

RD Training started last Tuesday and my life has pretty much revolved around that and conferences. I haven’t had the time to sit, breath, and plan that I’ve been used to thus far in the summer, which is good because I won’t be so shocked when the year comes around.

I’m in the midst of putting together my plan for my social justice program, finishing RA training planning, crafting my internship projects, trying to get ResLifer.com off the ground (which has been seriously delayed), and planning all the usual stuff for the upcoming year.

I’ve also moved into the planning stages of which conferences I’ll be attending and presenting at and what I’ll be trying to present. I feel like I keep harping on how excited I am about the upcoming year and the opportunities that I’ll have, but it just seems to keep getting better!

Fresh

I’ve given the TwentyTen theme a little refresh here on aaronhood.net. I went with a minimal approach and worked out some of the colors based on some inspiration from Kuler.

Next on the to-do list with the site is update my resume and my portfolio to have it all available here. While also pointing to my LinkedIn account and other resources.

The banner uses Stone Serif font and the tower is the top of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, PA.

Adventures in Pro Dev

One of my new(ish) passion projects is a blog that is specifically for Residence Life professionals/para-professionals. I want to create a place where people who are currently in positions write articles (blog posts) about some of their best practices and passions while creating a community that talks about their own work. The planning of this project has been going well and I had modified a WordPress theme to the point where is was almost entirely mine when I realized that I didn’t have support for the new menu feature in WordPress 3.0. This new feature ended up being critical to a new way that I was going to organize the site and I couldn’t figure out how to integrate it as well as the TwentyTen theme that comes standard in WordPress 3.0…

So, now I’m modifying TwentyTen to my liking so that I can have the native WordPress menus. All the original work has been scraped and I’m trying to salvage the color scheme because I quite liked it.

In other Professional Development news, I’m planning on making a couple of presentation proposals for conferences about online (read: FREE) professional development opportunities. I hope to send in the proposals to the North Carolina Housing Officers conference and the South Eastern Association of Housing Officers conference.