Modeled masculinity and it's effects on male college student engagement

I'm taking a break from school work. Ben, Caleb and I have been working at Payne's since 6:15 this evening. Mostly working on back checking citations I've used for my thesis proposal. Let me tell you how enjoyable that is. More enjoyable than taking my first drink of soy milk from Ben's Latte something or other that he ordered. Let's just say it tastes about as good as it smells when you steam that stuff. Not good.

My thesis topic is on modeled masculinity and it's effects on male student engagement in college. I have been researching this topic for almost two years now. During my first year back at Taylor the hall director I worked with wanted to make a presentation at a national conference that our staff would be attending in the summer and challenged me to get on board because it would help me get my feet wet heading into masters study the following year. I agreed and as we considered all of the different aspects of student life that we'd delt with during the semester, the topic of male student disengagement peeked our interest and away we went.

Student engagement (almost synonymous with the term involvement) is defined as the amount of physical or psychological energy that a student puts forth into any academically positive experience. Academically positive experiences occur both inside and outside of the classroom. They include things like asking questions in class, incorporating information from an outside class into the current class, co-curricular activities like student leadership positions or student activities cabinets, service learning projects, intramurals, attending various seminars and lecture series on campus, etc. Engagement also includes less formal things like building relationships with students of a different ethnicity, socio-economic, or geo-political background than you.

That spring I conducted a small scale qualitative study of 8 students in my residence hall; 4 students I considered ‘engaged’ and 4 that I considered ‘disengaged’. The study yielded two notable findings. First, the biggest contrast was that the ‘engaged’ students had older male mentors or role models in their lives and the ‘disengaged’ students did not. Second, The ‘disengaged’ students were less able to identify unrealistic characteristics of a male TV or movie character they perceived as the traditional man.

As I’ve spent the last year or so in more formal research of the topic, I’ve decided to look specifically at how masculinity is connected to student engagement. My research on masculinity has been very intriguing. First, masculinity is predominantly a social construction (i.e. boys learn what ‘being a man’ is from observing other men in their lives as they develop). Traditional masculinity , as defined my many sociologist and psychologist, constitutes four primary focuses: competition, status, toughness, and emotional stoicism. Men who embodied these focuses were integrated into society pretty functionally 40 years ago because there was a high level of congruence with the socio-cultural expectations of men at the time. Time has changed and culture along with it. We find men and women on a much more even playing field in most aspects of life: educational, vocational, relational, marital, etc. Unfortunately, for a broad range of attributed reasons, masculinity is being constructed (modeled) with the same traditional focuses. This incongruence between the modeled traditional masculinity and the new social expectations of men are causing any number of negative side effects the broader culture. My research steps into this space to gauge it’s effects specifically on male college students’ level of engagement.

Higher education has begun to feel the disengagement of male students, especially by student development professionals (i.e. residence hall directors, student programs directors, etc.). Male students are vastly outnumbered in applying for leadership positions, attending campus events, participating in class discussions, etc. A researcher by the name of George Kuh at Indiana University has been conducting a large scale data collection through an instrument he developed call the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) since 2001. A lot of schools, big and small, use this instrument because of the prevailing culture of assessment on college campuses. His research shows that male students are less engaged than women right now and they are much less engaged than they were 10 years ago. Again, this is where my research steps in by finding out if there’s any attribution to the trend. Certainly a trend this wide spread has more going on than simply not programming well enough or catering enough to the needs of college men. Male students are still entering college reporting just as high of expectations as women and as men did ten years ago, but they aren’t following through with those expectations.

In a culture of video-games, facebook, and iPhones, male students are certainly doing things with their time. Why is it that these other things are so much more appealing to them during their college years than engaging in the college experience they’re spending their money for? I’ll be looking to see if there is any correlation between their measured level of traditional masculinity and their level of engagement in college. Certainly this is not the whole answer, but I would be surprised if I found no correlation. It’s also a good start, as a student development professional, to be able to get more to the root of the issues with a student spending hours a day at a video game or checking facebook.