Sociocultural Conversations: Examining the Influence of Difficult Dialogues on Leadership Development

Abstract

Scholars have revealed three major precursors to sociocultural conversations: students' precollege characteristics, campus environments, and pedagogical conditions for sociocultural conversations. Below, we explore each of these precursors. Students' Precollege Characteristics. Both precollege experiences and identity often determine students' likelihood to engage in sociocultural conversations while in college. In fact, a key indicator of college students' openness to diversity in college is a similar openness before enrollment in college (Whitt, Edison, Pascarella, Terenzini, & Nora, 2001); however, many students graduate from homogenous high schools where they have interacted with relatively homogenous peers and thus might not have developed an openness to diversity (Milem, Umbach, & Liang, 2004). One' s identity also relates to one' s propensity to engage in sociocultural conversations; students of color are more likely to engage in sociocultural conversations than their peers (Milem & Umbach, 2003). Marginalized students typically face a society that systemically privileges dominant identities, and thus, those students may engage about and across differences more frequently due to their experiences navigating systemic oppression, microaggressions, and other forms of harassment and discrimination (Thom & Blades, 2014). Campus Environments. In addition to precollege characteristics, campus environments-both curricular and co-curricular-can foster sociocultural conversations (Hurtado, 2005; Klofstad, 2010). While many students encounter a general education curriculum where all students take a class in some sort of sociocultural topic (Brint, Proctor, Murphy, Turk-Bicakci, & Hanneman, 2009), students in certain majors, such as those in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), are less likely to engage in sociocultural conversations than their peers (Milem & Umbach, 2003; Whitt et al., 2001). Additionally, STEM majors tend to require demanding courses, potentially limiting the ability of STEM students to participate in co-curricular opportunities that foster sociocultural conversations. Yet, co-curricular opportunities, such as civic engagement (Hurtado, 2005; Klofstad, 2010), the pursuit of leadership roles (Blom & Johnson, 2018; Dugan & Komives, 2007), and opportunities within living learning communities (Inkelas et al., 2006) also provide exposure to sociocultural conversations. The presence of diverse others in the classroom also influences students' engagement across diversity in their co-curricular activities (Milem & Umbach, 2003), suggesting the importance of the compositional diversity of curricular spaces for students' engagement in sociocultural conversations in the co-curriculum. Pedagogical Conditions. Finally, no matter the setting of sociocultural conversations, certain conditions can make sociocultural conversations more effective for developing leadership capacities. A key condition NEW DIRECTIONS FOR STUDENT LEADERSHIP •

The soft tyranny of p‐values in quantitative research: New considerations for leadership researchers

“…Given the “14.6 in 100” chance probability (which is higher than the threshold of “5 in 100”), the program director would fail to reject the null hypothesis. Although there tends to be a positive relationship between students’ frequency of engaging in sociocultural conversations and leadership capacity (Buckley & Oliner, 2020), those findings were not replicated here. Consequently, the program director may decide to re‐evaluate the classroom activities designed to increase students’ frequency of engaging in sociocultural conversations, examine whether the respondents are representative of the population, or dig deeper in the data to explore the variables further.…”

“…For example, let's say a leadership program director at a large college wants to examine whether the relationships between sociocultural conversations and leadership outcomes (see Buckley & Oliner, 2020, for a review) are also present within the college's leadership program students. The director might pose a research question such as, “among leadership program participants, is there a significant relationship between the frequency with which students engage in sociocultural conversations and students’ leadership capacities?” The director administers a survey to all 2019 leadership program participants (population) and 125 respond to the survey (sample).…”