Every Optimization Is a Policy Failure: The Catch (and Release) of Student Success

The nexus of trans collegians’ pronouns and name practices navigating campus space(s): Beyond the binary.

“…and "how do they (or can they) function?" This highlights paths of problematization over solutions to be found (Eaton & Smithers, 2020;Smithers, 2020aSmithers, , 2020bSpringgay & Truman, 2018). Beginning in the middle, beyond the binary, and with becoming, we can imagine and create the futures we want to see.…”

“…Thinking with becoming and in the tensions between these two student suggestions, then, rather than dismissing these suggestions as good or bad, we can attune to their desire to orient to queer, trans, agender, and nonbinary life in such a way that it becomes part of the landscape. We might take up a suggestion from Smithers (2020a) who wrote, “if we are to believe that the current state of affairs is sustained by the million little practices we all do, then it also holds true that the current state of affairs can be changed by our practices. There are a million little resistances we can introduce to the system” (p. 16).…”

“…Building from this, in what follows we turn to our participants, who offer recommendations for practice and research throughout their narratives. We highlight these as a way of simultaneously being-with the experiences of students and their definitions of success, as well as becoming with the potential and possibilities offered in definitions of success that elide and elude capture (Eaton & Smithers, 2020; Smithers, 2020a, 2020b).…”

Pedagogical Impasses: Posthuman Inquiry in Exhaustive Times

“…Importantly, precarity is not only an economic and political orientation, it also affects the way we live and relate. For example, Smithers (in press) explored the phenomena of student success at universities, and how success as an optimization point calculated by retention and graduation rates informs not only institutional policies of advisement and enrollment, but filters down to the relations and encounters between and among administrators, faculty, staff, and students. In this way, precarity becomes a state-of-being characterized by a future that is always about to come, but is, simultaneously always on the horizon: a historical present.…”

“…Returning to Smithers’ (in press) example, orienting toward student success as an algorithm of graduation and retention rates means that the definition of success is always moving. Graduation rates constantly improving, “an impasse of continuous improvement, a goal with no future, only a present of improvement” (Smithers, in press, p. 9). We might also look to the impeachment proceedings and conversation swirling after the 2016 U.S. presidential election.…”