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Welcome to The HigherEdJobs podcast. I'm Andy Hibel the chief operating officer and one of the co-founders of HigherEdJobs.

[00:00:37] Kelly Cherwin: And I'm Kelly Cherwin, the director of editorial strategy at HigherEdJobs. Today we’re talking to Dr. Gina Ann Garcia, who is an associate professor in the department of educational foundations, organization, and policy at the University of Pittsburgh.

I actually met Gina a few years ago when we were on a panel together at the ASHE conference, which is the association for the study of higher education. And we've been working together over the [00:01:00] past couple of years. Gina has been a contributor to HigherEdJobs. So we're super excited to have her here today.So thank you, Gina, for joining us.

[00:01:07] Gina Garcia: Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

[00:01:09] Kelly Cherwin: So, I'm gonna start with the first question to let our listeners get to know you a little bit, but you've been quoted saying “as the compositional diversity of colleges and universities changes, the ways we educate and serve students must also shift. Administrators, faculty, and staff must commit to transforming the institutional structures for serving in order to enhance the educational experiences and outcomes of all students.

And you go on to say, this is what you write about you speak about and you work with colleges about, so where did this passion for this work come from?

[00:01:36] Gina Garcia: People ask me that a lot, because I am passionate. I think it comes through in not only the work that I do and the writing that I do, the scholarship that I produce, but like in the interactions, like the personal interactions, I do a lot of public speaking.

And I worked directly with institutions and the passion is, is clear. Like people know it's from the heart. It's not, it's not fake. It's not just my job. It's something [00:02:00] more. I always tell my story about how I came to be a researcher, particularly that is, is very centered on Hispanic-serving-institutions and understanding Hispanic-serving-institutions is because I am the product of a Hispanic-serving-institution. I'm an alumni of an alumna of Hispanic-serving-institutions, um, Cal State University Northridge, and the undergraduate experience that I had at Cal State Northridge has basically driven my whole career.

Like I chose to go into higher education. I got a degree in college student personnel in order to become a higher education professional, a student affairs professional. And so that experience was so transformative. And so when I got to writing about and thinking about what I was going to do with my dissertation and how I was really wanting to make a difference, HSIs kept coming up because not only from the undergraduate experience that I had, but also I worked as a title five coordinator, [00:03:00] which is a higher education act, title five of the higher education act is what is where the main funding stream for Hispanic-serving-institutions.

And I implemented a title five grant and it was really, really challenging, very challenging. I'm pretty sure that's why I went into a PhD program because I'm like, this is not easy. It's really hard work to implement something that is going to lead to transformational change on a campus. We know higher ed changes, but it changes slowly.

I am a believer that higher ed does change and I think we're witnessing it right now since 2021, we've been watching, I've been watching a collective awakening. I truly believe that we are in an important moment in higher ed for transformation. So all that to say that my passion comes from a lot of it from my own experiences, as an undergrad, as a professional, working in student affairs and implementing a title five grant it's at my core, making a difference is at my core and making a difference for my community, the Latino community. That's always driven me.

[00:03:59] Kelly Cherwin: Thank you. I [00:04:00] can feel your passion and I appreciate that.

[00:04:02] Andrew Hibel: That's lovely. And it's such an important part of any career in higher education, is the passion that's behind it. People always like talking about doing work that they love, but it's not just an adage. It's, it's really something that if you truly care about making a difference in the work that you do, it comes through not only in the work product, but also in the way you work with your colleagues.

It's, it's interesting talking about change. Obviously, the past couple of years have been pretty significant for higher education. If I could dare say maybe changes may still be slow, but maybe it's not as slow as it was two years ago. We were forced to do a lot of things differently. What have been kind of some of the challenges for HSIs over the past couple of years, that have been unique because of some of the changes that have come around.

[00:04:47] Gina Garcia: Great question. Particularly around COVID right? Like the past couple of years, we've had a lot of things going on that have forced us into change. And I think we're continuing to watch the world is shifting. Right. We're trying to figure out life post [00:05:00] COVID and a lot of stuff that came out of the, of COVID is inequities.

Right. Inequities in experiences, inequities in access to healthcare inequities in the number of people who have died from COVID-19 there's tons of inequities that were just highlighted even more. Those of us that do equity work, we knew they were there, but they they've elevated. And so for colleges and universities COVID-19 is part of that and seeing the inequities for students.

Inabilities to access various basic needs and, or becoming housing insecure, food insecure, those sorts of things elevated for HSIs. Many of the HSIs I worked with were focused on just getting students access to wifi. You can't go totally virtual if your students don't have access to wifi. And depending on the demographics, which HSIs serve a demographic that is lower income, a larger percentage of lower income students are enrolled in, in Hispanic-serving-institutions, you have to be concerned with [00:06:00] those kinds of things.

They need to be able to access everything that's now gone remote. Otherwise you lose the access to education. Now the flip side is I am learning from one of my doctoral students is doing research with Latinx students with disabilities as it at an HSI. And it's been interesting to learn with that group of students and learn with her about their ability to access resources that they weren't able to before, because you know, you're not able to access things, um, particularly the kind of ability or disability that you have. And so hearing from her participants and learning like that, some of them are like, I am more engaged in, in school now. And like, I can access many more things now, particularly students with physical disabilities saying things like I can turn off my camera and nobody has to see me, but I'm here.

But I don't need to be physically there. I don't need somebody physically driving me to campus. Like my parents. What can we learn? That's been good and what can we learn that like isn't good? Right? And how do we address [00:07:00] those things? And a lot of it is access access to what an access or who to access will continue to be a concern, but it looks different than just access to college.

It's access to more than just college, right? Like once you actually get into college, what do you need to actually thrive? And how do we provide those services? And can we do it in different ways, right? It's forced us to sort of think outside the box about ways we can do that. There's a lot going on right in front of our eyes that we can think about and should lean into learning from.

[00:07:29] Kelly Cherwin: Gina, I want to ask a question related to what you were saying about us learning to serve. So, as I mentioned earlier, you have contributed to HigherEdJobs. In the past, you are a former author and write. And you're actually the author of the book becoming Hispanic serving institutions, opportunities for colleges and universities.

And you also referenced in an article regarding the topic of servingness. Can you explain what servingness means in relation to HSIs.

[00:07:54] Gina Garcia: Servingness is a concept that my colleagues and I proposed a [00:08:00] couple of years back and it's totally taken off. It is something that people don't even like do a double take.

People aren’t like, wait, what? That's not really a word. Cause it's not, really like servingness is a made up word. You know, it could just be serving, but servingness it's, like it took off because it embodies a lot. Right. And that's what we were trying to do was think about if you could measure how well HSIs are doing to serve their students.

Well, how are you gonna measure that? And my colleagues and I that wrote about that. Dr. Emory Nunez and Dr. Vanessa Sunsone we're researchers. We are quantitative researchers. We're qualitative researchers, we're mixed methods researchers. And the bottom line was we were like, how are you going to measure this?

If you're a researcher, you can't say that you've actually hit that point where you're adequately serving students until you're able to measure it. And the only measure that was being used, which is my early work, it's been the critique since my dissertation in 2013. Graduation rates cannot be the only measure.[00:09:00]

Now graduation rates are an important measure. I'm not going to say they're not, I always have to be very intentional to say, if you graduate students, you should be graduating students equitably obviously. And not if you should be serving your students and one indicator is to graduate them. But for me, that couldn't be the only indicator because there are so many other things, you know, even talking about intersectional experiences like students with disabilities, students that they're non binary gender.

Students that come in and they were formerly incarcerated students. Students that are parents, there's all these different types of students and they need more than to graduate or to transfer or to get a certificate or whatever it is that they came for. Thinking about community college outcomes. It's more than just graduating community colleges do more than just graduate students.

They transfer students, they provide training for the community. Like it's part of their mission. And HSIs are community colleges as well. And so for me, a single measure of graduation rate was not sufficient. And I'm like, it's [00:10:00] one indicator. It cannot be the sole indicator of serving students of the S in HSI.

How are we going to get at the S that's more complicated than just that also graduation or completion is typically, higher ed, we generally go with 150%. Which is six years for a four year institution and three years for a two year institution. So you can't even measure that in the life cycle of an HSI grant, because the nature of that grant is typically five years.

And so you can't even measure it fully. Um, so it can't be the only indicator. And so that was a big part of proposing the servingness model. What other indicators, in addition to graduation, addition to completion, which the federal government is always going to want that measure. And I get that, and that that's an important measure and presidents want that.

And boards, institutional boards want that, but what else? In doing a literature review, we did a systematic literature review of all the research that had been done with HSIs. And we basically said, this is how [00:11:00] other researchers are conceptualizing servingness, even though they didn't call it servingness. We like coined the term servingness, but they were measuring it in all these different ways saying like, if students are able to speak Spanish or they're multi-lingual students, that they are able to speak multiple languages, that they want to do that.

Right. And that, that was happening at HSIs. If they want to be able to interact with people that look like them or come from the same place as them, or have a same immigrant experience as them, or they are undocumented immigrants and they want to interact with other undocumented people. All of those things were coming up in HSI literature.

And so we put it together into a model and proposed a model or a framework that said what you do matters. And that's a part of servingness. Curriculum matters. Having faculty who can connect with students and validate their lived experiences matters, serving students in multiple ways beyond what we have traditionally done in higher ed matters.

Students [00:12:00] not experiencing racism matters. Students not experiencing discrimination matters. All of that goes into the model. And if you think about that, then there should be changes in the outcomes. And so we propose this model that could be tested by grants, right? Like in grants, people can use it to, to propose their grants.

People can use it in research, they could use it in quantitative research. They can use it in qualitative work. My student who I was talking about her dissertation, she uses it. She uses network analysis. I should say her name by the way, Emily Corin, almost to be Dr. Emily Corin to give her the credit she uses it.

You can use it with any type of method to frame your study, right? To understand servingness in all these different ways. And so that's servingness from like a very research perspective. From a practical perspective, people are like, how do we know we're doing it? They bring me on and I work with them so that they can say, how do we know we're doing it?

At what point are we doing it? And that's where I say, pick a thing. You can't change everything all at once. Like pick a thing [00:13:00] and then pick what you're going to measure after you do the thing. And that could be a lot of things, right? If you're going to work with faculty and provide anti-racism training, then how are you going to measure that they actually are now implementing anti-racist practices in the classroom.

What do you want students to get out of that? That could be the sole way you're determining that you're advancing towards servingness. So it's giving people a tool to think, okay, servingness, doesn't have to look like what all other HSIs do. We can decide what servingness looks like. Providing books for students that are low income, that could be servingness, providing wifi for students that don't have wifi access and they need it for their courses.

That could be a measure of servingness, but there's so many different ways. And so the model has given people that, a way to say, well, what do we do? What are we already doing and how do we do more of it? How do we do better and not have to look? I always say, don't look at the HSI to the right and to the left.

Look at yourself, look inward and decide what are we doing? And how is that connected to this idea of servingness? Because it's not one [00:14:00] thing, this multi-dimensional, it goes all kinds of different. And so it's allowed people to, to take a breath and say, wow, we might actually be doing some things that are part of this servingness framework.

And we actually can do other things because now we have a framework to work with.
[00:14:13] Andrew Hibel: What was so wonderful about your answer as he took us from theory into practice and even prioritizing, if you're looking at doing this in practice, what can be done? But this has changed. This is real change. I think one of the challenges that institutions have with real change is they always kind of liked to, as I like to put, they confuse a fire with a spark that they have some success and they have a spark and they need to kindle the spark before it becomes the fire.

And the fire is okay, this is set and real change is here to stay and it will progress. But in that kindling stage of your spark, what is the biggest challenge at, okay, you've implemented one or two of those initiatives and you're like, [00:15:00] okay, we are poised for change, but staff can change, students can change, challenges on the organization and the people there can change people's behavior.

What is the key point where you kind of feel like now we're on a trajectory that sustainable for change and what can institutions do prior to implementing those first couple things they're doing that really provides an infrastructure to make sure you're on a path for real change at that point?
[00:15:30] Gina Garcia: That's where I'm at with the work. And I am a very theoretical thinker, right? I'm a researcher. A majority of my time is spent doing research and producing new knowledge. That's what I'm paid to do. Right. That's what my institution wants me to do, but it doesn't work in practice. It sounds all dreamy like, oh yeah, it sounds great.

And you know, it gets people motivated, but it doesn’t always looked like that in practice. So I'm currently part of a fellowship program. The student experience, research network, SERN. They have this mid-career fellowship for equity scholars, like myself [00:16:00] who were trying to answer exactly what you said is like, how do we take these theoretical things we do and actually make them policy relevant, not even practically relevant PR policy relevant policy for institutions, policy, for state governments, policy for federal governments, like policy is a lot of things, right?

It's big P little P policy. It's challenging when, when we trying to like figure out what is the one thing at a time, and I think that's what I'm learning with this as I'm going through the experience with them is it's one thing at a time. And it's like, we do sort of have to slow down because higher ed doesn't change quickly.

And because as you noted. People leave and leaders, I can't tell you how many times I've interacted with campuses that are like, they're moving, moving, and they get a new president. And then they stop because this president says they don't want to do this work and we're not going to be an HSI.
There's no money in HSIs. I literally have had campuses tell me that a president has said, there's no money in HSI. We're not doing HSI. And then a new campus say we were at that [00:17:00] point and now we have a new president. This president wants us to do it. They believe in it theoretically, and then they'll start moving again.

Right. And so it's like a go, a stop and go a stop a go. So I think it does matter. All of those things matter. I honestly I'm at this point of like, we've got to get it into governing boards, for sure. The association of governing boards, they're trying to figure it out. Right? Like I'm on the advisory board with.

Same thing. They believe in it too. Like if your governing board doesn't support, um, and it's not just servingness in HSI, but support anti-racism and equity injustice, then it's going to be hard to push the agenda. So your accreditation processes I'm like strongly believe, like until we get into that way where we're evaluated at larger levels, because we know higher ed is evaluated and we respond, every single person responds to that evaluation process.

For tenure stream faculty like myself, we respond to the promotion and tenure process. If it's not in the P and T document, well then I'm not going to do it because I'm not going to be [00:18:00] rewarded for doing it right. Institution. Same thing. If it's not in that accreditation review, then why were we going to do it?

It's not going to be rewarded. It's not going to actually get us anywhere. Um, so that's where I'm at is trying to figure out how do you get it to that policy level and make policy changes? Because until it's at that policy level, it's hard at the classroom level. It's hard at the individual program level.
It's hard at the individual person level to make large systemic changes.

[00:18:29] Andrew Hibel: That's an incredibly insightful answer. And thank you for taking us through that. So succinctly it's so reflective though, cause you brought it back to accreditation in the 25 years of doing this. When I have a substantive conversation about accreditation, it is usually a lengthy one just as institutions and you, you brought it back.

A president can come and go, but if it's culture of a governing board, that culture is going to then permeate the senior leadership, the administration and the campus, because it's a core value of the [00:19:00] organization because what we think of accreditation, we think of it separately from government affairs.

When we're talking with state, local, and federal government. We're talking about one thing, and we're talking about accreditation, we're talking about two things and we have to kind of acknowledge the hard facts about accreditation it's government, deciding that they don't want it accredit us. And they've delegated this to these other bodies.

So there is, the governing board for accreditation has deliberately separated itself, governing board being our government from the body. That actually is the accreditation. So you're fighting not only what's going on within accreditation. There's a disconnect between those two that governments and government money may change due to government priorities.

I could see why you ran into all that difficulty in trying to figure out that point.

[00:19:50] Kelly Cherwin: Let's switch gears and talk about an article you wrote for us a couple years ago regarding anti-racist hiring practices and higher education. In that article, you discussed several ways higher ed can change [00:20:00] or revamp that process. I'm just curious. Have you seen any changes over the past two years in terms of progress being made?

[00:20:07] Gina Garcia: Again, no, it's again, not pleading the fifth. I just, yeah, I haven't actually seen it again, I think there's a lot going on. I am like an eternal optimist, so I always find the good. And you see that in my research.

I think, I think that's why people can get behind, but she finds something good. And so I think there are good things happening. So I would shout out in this case, the USC race and equity center, they have a whole training that they're doing around this exact concept that you can send people to this professional training to learn how to be better about hiring within higher ed.

I actually created a workshop, institutions workshops. Like if they ask me to come work with their institution, I give them a list and that's one of them. Nobody has asked for that session. And I don't think that they're not interested in it. I think there aren't ready.

Andrew Hibel: Why do you think they're not ready for it?

[00:21:00] In higher ed, we want to tinker with little things that we think we can change and not big things. Hiring practices. That's huge. It's not little, it's massive. So I think that there are certain things institutions aren't fully ready for yet. And I write about those things and people embrace some things much more quickly, like changing your curriculum.

Maybe faculty are just perpetual learners where like we know that's what we do. We got into this business to learn forever. Basically. So they're ready, right? They're like, okay, fine. I'll change the way I teach. Fine. I'll teach online. Fine. I'll do it. But we're not ready to change bigger systems.

[00:21:37] Andrew Hibel: How do you have those conversations with those governing boards that are more traditional in a way that make substantive change and make the parties willing to honestly look at the situation and put the hard work in to make those changes.

I imagine there's folks who do that sort of work quite well, but that has to be extremely difficult work to move a governing board safely, comfortably, [00:22:00] intentionally, honestly, in that sort of direction.
[00:22:02]

Gina Garcia: Right. And I will shout out my colleagues. I like to make sure I give people credit. Cause I learned from so many people like Raquel RA, Felicia Commodore, Demetrius Morgan, that those are who I'm learning from right now.

Those are the researchers I'm reading, who are driving that governing board agenda. And they've been doing it with MSIs and particularly HBCUs, but they're pushing for, yeah, you can't just diversify your governing board. You actually have to train them to be equity minded. I see the same thing about hiring faculty.

You need to diversify your faculty and your staff, your governing board. And they need to be able to do equity work. They need to want to do equity work and the people who are already there because you can't just let them sit there and just ignore them, walk over them and be like, we'll just hope that they leave someday.

I used to say, faculty don't die, they just stay, they stay a long time. They don't retire, [00:23:00] they don't retire. Um, and maybe I'll be that faculty. I don't know. I can see why this is such a wonderful job, but you've got to change, you know, the way folks operate that are here and aren't leaving. So hiring new and getting new and more diverse people is one part of it.

But there's multiple parts of it.

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[00:23:46] Kelly Cherwin: Gina, I'm so glad that you're giving shout outs. And I love the fact that you said you were learning from each other because that's one of the reasons why we're doing this podcast is to learn from people like you and to share with our listeners the things that we're all learning. So thank you for doing that.

[00:24:00] Andrew Hibel: For those of you listening out there, please email us at podcast@higheredjobs.com or send us a tweet @higheredjobs. Let us know if you're thinking, or if you have a question you'd like us to pass along to Gina. If you have some thoughts on the subject, we really do like hearing from you and really do read your correspondence with us.

[00:24:17] Kelly Cherwin: Gina. I know I've known you for a few years and you are always busy doing something you're speaking, you’re writing or teaching researching. I heard that you have another project in the works.

[00:24:27] Gina Garcia: I do have a project in the works, which will be a second Johns Hopkins university press book. That's the publisher for ‘becoming Hispanic serving institutions.’
This book is currently titled ‘transforming Hispanic serving institutions.’ I hope that we get to keep that name 'cause it really is about transformation. It's about organizational change and everything that we're talking about comes out in the book at least a little bit. Unfortunately, I talk about so many dimensions in the book that I don't go in depth in any of these things.

I'm like, okay. Yes. Governing boards. Okay. Accreditation. [00:25:00] Okay. Federal government, the funders, the Gates. How do we get the Gates foundation on board? The book is called transforming HSIs, and it's a framework and it's got different dimensions that talk about institutions that if you want to transform as an HSI, you can't just focus on one dimension of the institution.

You have to focus on multiple dimensions all at the same time. For example, the last chapter is basically targeting institutional advancement, which isn't an area that people generally target in equity and justice work. Institutional advancement is one of those areas on campus that has a lot of influence that nobody talks about in these kinds of conversations.

And we have to, right, what is institutional advancement? Do they interact with government? They interact with local governments. They interact with federal. They interact with alumni, with donors, communities. We have community engagement that often is attached to that area. It's so much more complex than just development and fundraising.

There's lots of dimensions to institutional advancement. How do you work with, I call them external [00:26:00] influences. Um, and it's all these things we're talking about that, like, how do you convince your state governments or federal governments to be on board with this equity and justice work or this anti-racism.

And so I talk about it as an organizational theorist that if you're not working with your external influences, you're going to have trouble changing your organization. One of the biggest ones for me, when it comes to HSIs is the federal grants that are designated for HSIs, the title five and title three and NSF.

There's a lot of HSI dollars in NSF, the federal agencies that are funding HSIs until those organizations say, ‘you have to implement anti-racist hiring practices as part of your grant,’ nobody's going to do it. There's other external influences that could also say, ‘you got to rethink your hiring practices.’
Anybody you hire for this grant, they've got to be on board with this and you got to rethink it at an organizational level and or you have to rethink the composition of your campus because the data are strong that HSI is still have very white faculty and [00:27:00] administrators decision makers. So until there's some sort of motivation from the folks who are providing funding to HSIs, then there's not a run to change the composition of the faculty, the staff, the governing boards, all the people that matter.

Other chapters, I think are more tangible to people. I talk about curriculum, the membership composition, those things are things we've been talking about in HSIs for quite some time, I talk about governance. How do you make decisions? But I also talk about grassroots leaders, which are those leaders on campus that don't have decision-making power necessarily, but that they're moving the institution.

Grassroots leadership is a concept that is really thinking about like social movement within an organization. And I'll shout out Adriana Kaisar for that. Um, one of my mentors is an organizational theorist. She's written a lot about grassroots leadership in higher education and how one person working to make change from the inside can actually make change at a large organizational level.
Even if they aren't the president or the chancellor or the governing board or the dean like that, they can [00:28:00] one person start movement that have the ability to make change. That's what social movements are. And so I talk about that and I say that's a valid form of leadership too, governance from a traditional or normative perspective in higher ed matters.

Who's within those governance structures does matter because they're not going away. But those more informal decision-making structures as well, I call transforming HSIs a freedom dream. What would freedom and liberation for people of color or Latinx people to feel like they are empowered and enabled to go out and make a change in the world after they leave higher ed.

And I guess if I got back to what I was talking about outcomes and how do we measure servingness that's for me, where I'm at that, like, there's gotta be those liberatory outcomes. And I wrote about this in a blog too for y'all. And I talked about what if liberation was an, a tangible outcome for higher ed and I've been talking about it ever since.

And when I say it, people are like, wow that's powerful. And I can get behind that you're right graduation and getting [00:29:00] a job and graduating with low debt and those academic outcomes, those economic outcomes, those post-college outcomes all matter, never going to say those don't matter. So those are in the book too, but then I say, but what else?

What if people got to have a liberatory education from a Paulo Freiren perspective, they experience education that changes. And that changes their look on the world and that they can go out and feel empowered to make a difference in their own communities and beyond it's an exciting book and I hopefully will come back and talk to you all more about it when it comes out.

[00:29:33] Kelly Cherwin: I’m excited for the book as well. I can't wait. I have a career question. So, I love the fact that you are an optimist, but I also know that you are a realist as well. Putting your advisor hat, you know, you're speaking to some of your PhD students to your students. What would you tell them for career advice to how to pursue their passion, how to keep moving forward, how to make a difference, be that change maker?

It sounds like you're [00:30:00] talking about some of this in your book. So what advice do you give to them?

[00:30:03] Gina Garcia: For one, I am a realist. You're right. I am. I'm an optimist and I'm realizing I'm sort of balanced. For one, I trained my students how to make sure they can fit into those. I call them normative outcomes, right.

Those things that we all know and believe that like, there are certain things you have to do to prepare yourself for a job. Like you have to have your resume or your CV, um, aligned in certain ways, those normative things are going to get you at least the job interview, thinking about that real part of it.
And then the optimistic part of me is like, but what's going to set you apart. That's that dreaming. That's that ability for you to see yourself as somebody who can make change right. As a grassroots leader, as an institutional agent who can enact change. And I think I do that the way I keep my students motivated.

And those folks that I had the opportunity to mentor is to ask them about themselves and to turn it inward. Like what drives you? Even the first question that y'all ask me is like, what drives [00:31:00] you? Because what drives you is often what's going to set you apart often what's going to make you keep going.

I've mentioned my doctoral student, Emily Corin, and her dissertation it's driven by her own identities in many ways, even not identifying as a Latinx person. Right. But as a person who's living with discipline, to be able to see herself in the research. It drives you versus saying you should do something.
That's going to get you a job. Nobody's going to hire you when you talk about that topic, that could be the approach versus saying you should absolutely write about and follow your passion. Because it's going to get you a lot further, right? You're going to stay committed to it, and you're going to find somebody who's willing to listen.

Right. And to, to follow your freedom, dream that all of us have a different freedom dream. And it's often driven by our own experiences. So yeah, I think that's part of it. The balance of like, what's gonna get you a job. What's going to keep you, you know, we live in a capitalist society. And so there's realities of that and I get that, but what's going to [00:32:00] keep driving you and sustaining you beyond.

If you stay in higher ed within higher ed, because we need to be sustained within higher ed as well.
[00:32:08] Andrew Hibel: You talked about your passion and how this work matter to you. And we always talk about what we can do and work and the passion we have towards it. And the difference it's making does your work help you Gina, as a person, figure out who you are and what your life's journey is and what's meaningful to you?

[00:32:24] Gina Garcia: Yeah. That's a deep question. It does. And I mean, I talk about it a lot and so it is, it's an easy question to answer. It's a deep question, but it's an easy question to answer. Part of it is because I am very reflective on my practices and I'm very reflective as a researcher. I am one of those researchers who absolutely believes that, how we show up to do research is influenced by our own lenses.

It's influenced by our own experiences, by our own ways of being that's part of it, right. Is like, I am able to reflect on my own journey and understand how do I see myself in what I'm doing now and how do I continue to be better. [00:33:00] And I'll give you an example. Sometimes I have had to reflect back on like, I go out and I give a public lecture and I get people motivated.

And I'm saying you should care about liberatory outcomes. For example, that matters your students should be engaging with the community to make change. And then I go back and I look at my own syllabus. I teach a course in social justice and higher ed. And I'm constantly telling people that there should be a community component to social action that you should be committed to community.
If you're going to do social action, once you are committed to transformation, but I don't have a community component in my syllabus. So this year for the first time I put it and I think I was reluctant because I didn't know what it would look like. It's not my area. I talk about it all the time, but I am not an expert in what community engagement looks like.

There's people on campus that do that. I don't do that. And so I said, let me put it in and I'll learn as we go. It was transformative, was transformative for me to learn with my students. It was transformative for them and I didn't know what was gonna [00:34:00] happen. Cause it was the middle of COVID still, I wasn't even sure if they could actually go engage with communities, but it was very specific for them to engage with organizations that are doing social justice work in Pittsburg.

Every single students, they all went to a different organization. So that was one thing I learned about them. They shared them with me. I followed them all in Instagram. I more aware of things. I am getting more engaged with some of them because my students introduced me to them and I want to get involved with those organizations.

And so I'm constantly reflective. I'm like, I can’t just speak about it. I have to be about it. Walk, walking what you talk. Right. And so constantly, constantly reflecting on, on my own practices as I'm writing about them and talking about them with other folks.

[00:34:43] Andrew Hibel: Thank you so much, Gina. That was, that was wonderful.

We really appreciate you taking time with us sharing your, your knowledge and yourself with everyone. And we look forward to having you back on sometime soon and talking some more.

[00:34:55] Gina Garcia: Thank you. Thank you,

[00:34:57] Andrew Hibel: Gina. We appreciate your time. [00:35:00] Thanks for listening.