A Place to Rest My Soul: How a Doctoral Student of Color Group Utilized a Healing-Centered Space to Navigate Higher Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This piece tackles a pressing issue within higher education and the training of doctoral candidates: how to provide a meaningful, inclusive, and equitable graduate experience for all students. What I like about this piece is that it explores the efficacy of healing-centered spaces for doctoral students of color. The article offers a detailed and insightful description and analysis of the benefits of the Critical Conversations Collective. The article is well-organized, clearly-written, and well-argued. It shares a strategy other students might want to export to other graduate programs and offers a suggestion for graduate programs at PWI about an idea to help their students. 

I have a handful of suggestions for improving the piece, if the author finds them useful:

1. I thought the first paragraph would have benefitted from a quantitative study that showed how graduate students of color are leaving their graduate programs at higher rate than other students and not realizing the post-graduate success due to both structural racism and the failure of programs to provide inclusive and equitable environments.  I am pretty sure the author could find such data. That data would show that cultural inequality in turn shapes placement rates and success in their future professions.

2. I thought it might be useful to break down healing into its elements, as quoted on page 2: (1) restore a sense of humanity, (2) self-care, and (3) engage in social justice work. And then bring those three elements back directly later in the piece (pages 8 and 9).

3. Insert a section about "rest" that matches theoretical discussion of "healing" on page two. This might be the most pressing suggestion. It seems like the piece later has some ambivalence about the word "rest" (lines 305-307). I wondered if a different concept, perhaps "refuge" or "safe space" might be better and if the piece could find a scholar or two who has explored rest, refuges, or safe spaces in more theoretical detail. 

4. A lot of reliance on Ginwright here. Are there other scholars who engage this framework?

5.  I wondered if the author might want to look toward the scholarship about Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for an analogy or comparison. There is some data that suggests that ERGs have helped some companies (but not all) support employees of color and LGBTQ+ folks network and be mentored and change corporate policy too. (The devil is in the details). What the article describes feels like an ERG for graduate students. I also wondered if the article wanted to make any connection to the scholarship about mentoring. This probably could be done in a footnote.

6. The article mentions "true authentic selves" (line 360). This may be at odds with the anti-essentialism of critical race theory.  It seems like the rest of that paragraph relies on a socially constructed sense of identity formation.

7. I thought the question (lines 463-465) could be developed more fully. It has been my experience that PWI cannot simply add a program like this, without some real work being done. Otherwise, the programs are not supported and the institutions are not really behind them. Perhaps, lay out the challenges and how an institution could do this right.

This piece contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions and is of high quality.

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This piece represents the critical voice of doctoral Students of Color, which is necessary to creating more liberatory higher education experiences for all students. While there is critical dialogue happening and it represents diverse perspectives, the paper leaves me wanting more in understanding the individual and collective experiences of the author and participants and how it relates to the larger discourse. 

 

 

Overall Feedback: 

I feel it is important to explicitly define who the author is referring to when discussing "Students of Color". Also, it is important to acknowledge the nuance within experiences of SOC. While it later becomes evident that the author identifies as Chicana, I wish this information was more up front.

I would like to see more current conversations around race/racism and gender in the section titled “Graduate Students of Color and Racism”. 

 

The section titled, Materials and Methods, reads more as a positionality statement. I would suggest editing the headings to reflect the section topics.

 

Lit Rev.:

Overall, I feel the literature rev. needs to be more robust. Based on the nature of the CCC, it seems the literature review needs to discuss the lack of culturally responsive curriculum, healing centered curriculum in higher education. Also, it would benefit from discussing how sister scholarship and/or peer mentorship is a common form of survival/ resistance for SOC in higher ed.  

 

Data Collection/ Analysis

It is not until the data collection section that it becomes evident on what the project was.  This should be presented earlier in the paper to guide the reader. 

 

There needs to be more description around how grounded theory was used to analyze your work. Since the sessions were not recorded, what forms of data were used to write this piece (jottings, fieldnotes, etc?)?

 

Were the names used pseudonyms? It seems that the information provided for some of the participants may make them easily identifiable after publication of the un-deidentified version of this piece (i.e. hometown).

 

Results/ Discussion

As the findings/ results are not novel, the author should do more to demonstrate the analysis process. What do the quotes do to illustrate the individual and collection experiences of the particiapants? How is thier experience related to their positionality/ backgrounds? Connect the findings to current literature to bolster the discussion.

 

As this piece seems to center the conversations that happened with in the CCC program and the subsequent interviews, it is necessary to explain more about how this CCC project come about. What were the intentions and how did it align with or diverge from, and/or build upon the original intent. What was the author’s position in the CCC (facilitator, organizer, participant)?  How did you meet the other doc students and how did the CCC project come about? How did you differentiate pláticas from the interviews?

 

I would like to see a more critical discussion of what rest means for SOC in institutional spaces and how these maroon communities can foster spaces of rest, healing, wholeness and joy despite the institutional experiences.

 

I look forward to seeing this piece published. I feel it adds to the ongoing discourse around how to humanize the higher education experience for all students.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

It would suffice to title the section labeled "Materials and Methods" just "Methods".