Trusting Each Other

Abstract

Many minority, first-generation, and low-income students aspire to college; however, the college application process can present a significant obstacle. These students cannot always rely on their parents for college information and must instead turn to their high schools, where counselors are in a key position. Drawing on a two-year field study at two racially and socioeconomically diverse high schools and interviews with 89 students and 22 school counseling faculty and staff, I examine the role of trust in creating successful student-counselor relationships that can facilitate the transmission of social capital during the college application process. My findings indicate that distrust between counselors and students is due to a lack of shared understanding regarding expectations and roles. My evidence suggests that the diverse nature of the school context created structural constraints that contributed to this distrust. By analyzing the strategies of one counselor who succeeded in connecting with students and working through these structures, I demonstrate ways that trusting relationships can be formed.

"Why am I in school?": a mixed methods investigation into stopping out of college.

“…In addition to the culture of the institution and the actions of its agents as key to students' integration, students' help-seeking behavior must also be considered when exploring students' engagement with their school. Help-seeking behavior is a mechanism through which students gain access to support and resources and it is directly tied to students' social capital and their trust of institutional agents (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977;Holland, 2015;Jack, 2016;Stanton-Salazar, 1997). Students' engagement with the academic activities outside-of-class (e.g.…”

“…Students' social capital varies based on their social class, impacting the rules they follow when navigating their education and asking for help (Yee, 2016). Furthermore, the transactional nature of counseling relationships experienced in high school informs students' perspectives on the limited nature of those in helping roles, encouraging a lack of trust in institutional agents (Gast, 2016;Holland, 2015;Stanton-Salazar, 1997). Applying a social reproduction lens to our understanding of the challenges students face in connecting with institutional agents helps to better identify barriers to integration.…”

“…Tinto (1993) described isolation as "the absence of sufficient interactions whereby integration may be achieved" and that it is avoidable if institutions take action to engage students (p. 50). Students interact with institutions differently based on their backgrounds and social capital; if institutions want to engage all students, they must employ proactive techniques with the goal of building trusting relationships that empower students to ask for help (Holland, 2015;Jack, 2016;Yee, 2016). In addition to striving to develop supportive relationships with students, institutions should engage in intentional learning partnerships where students' internal voices are brought into the conversation both inside and outside the classroom to assist students through their development (Baxter Magolda, 2008).…”

“…Situating the reasoning for a college education around the importance of the degree for financial and career opportunities limits students' understanding of what it takes to earn a degree and how to make the degree work for them. Expanded information about college, including the cultural capital valued by institutions of higher education, is especially important to working-class students and students of color as they turn to their high school counselors for the information and support that their families cannot provide (Gast, 2016;Holland, 2015;Rosenbaum, 2001). Students and postsecondary institutions will both benefit from a shift in the high school level conversation to a focus on how to be successful in college and the humancapital-building process of a college education (Rosenbaum, 2001).…”

Allocating Opportunity: The Role and Impact of School Counselors in Promoting Access to AP Coursework

“…First, I sought to differentiate from past research in an attempt to reveal school counselor perceptions and behaviors at the intersection of professional role, decision making, and local AP policy. Previous literature has examined the student-counselor relationship in the domain of academic advising and the influence of this process on student outcomes (Engberg & Gilbert, 2014;Holland, 2015;. Specific attention has been given to student perceptions of counselor efficacy in this regard (Johnson, Rochkind, Ott, & DuPont, 2010;Vela-Gude et al, 2009).…”