1 Making Sense of Worldview Diversity at Public Universities

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Making Sense of Worldview Diversity at Public Universities:

An Exploration of Student Encounters using Critical Sensemaking

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Beth Ashley Staples

Graduate Program in Educational Studies

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee

Dr. Matthew J. Mayhew, Advisor

Dr. Tatiana Suspitsyna

Dr. Noelle W. Arnold

Copyrighted by

Beth Ashley Staples

2019

Abstract

This study advances our understanding of how students are making sense of their encounters across worldview differences related to religion, spirituality, faith, and values

at public higher education institutions. Critical sensemaking (CSM) was used as a

conceptual framework to understand the in-the-moment process of individual sensemaking and how individual and organizational sensemaking is influenced by the formative, structural, and discursive contexts of higher education (Helms Mills, Thurlow,

& Mills, 2010). The study employed content analysis methodology (Mayring, 2000) and a two-tiered structural and concept coding analysis strategy (Saldaña, 2011) to explore secondary focus group data from five public institutions from a qualitative case study

dataset created through the longitudinal, mixed-methods Interfaith Diversity Experiences

and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS) project. The key findings of this study are:

1) students use sensemaking as an opportunity to shed old ways of being and knowing; 2)

student sensemaking is highly social and students often make sense of their encounters

with worldview diversity through the lens of perceived social norms; and, 3) students

perceive the university as sensegiving about worldview through funding allocations, space reservation priorities, staff member availability, and in comparison with other

social identity work. These results are relevant to research because they extend the use of

CSM to college students as actors, focus groups as data, and diversity as a topic for

ii examination. They also show that two properties of CSM, social and extracted cues, are particularly important to student sensemakers and highlight the relevance of formative,

structural, and discursive contexts of higher education influence sensemaking about

worldview diversity. Additionally, these results provide guidance for practitioners and

faculty who want to help students engage with and across worldviews, indicate that institutions of higher education should more specifically communicate how they support worldview development and difference, and confirm that worldview is a relevant part of student identity at public institutions. Taken together, the knowledge gained through this study about the student sensemaking process can be used to maximize student development related to worldview diversity.

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Dedication

To my mom, Patricia Irene Staples

1951-1999

I am who I am today because you showed me how to find my own voice.

To my daD and Brother, for your constant support and always making me feel short.

To my family, for your fierce love and ability to find humor in every situation.

To my God, for having plans for a hope and a future that I could not imagine for myself.

Acknowledgments

My journey to PhD has been a winding through high-rises and flatlands, and I would be remiss to not acknowledge the many, many people who have made it possible for me to complete my degree. I want to start by thanking every student who chose to participate in an IDEALS focus group over the course of the last two years. I have had the opportunity to get to know you through the stories you shared with each other and I am hopeful that the next generation of leaders will engage with their inner lives in meaningful and beautiful new ways.

I want to thank my dissertation committee, Dr. Matt Mayhew, Dr. Tatiana

Suspitsyna, and Dr. Noelle Arnold. Without you, this project would not have been as rigorous or thoughtful. You challenged me to be a more focused researcher, uncovering nuances and complexities revealed by my participants. I truly appreciate the lessons I have learned from each of you, for your willingness to challenge me to make it better, and for your graciousness as we rescheduled my dissertation defense three times!

Matt, this is the end of a journey that started through our connection to the amazing Dr. Alyssa Rockenbach and thread its way through NYC and out to O-hi-o. I loved being your boss for a year and have been honored and humbled to have the opportunity for you to be my boss and fearless leader these last three years (plus one more to come!). Alyssa, my understanding of the hallmarks of good qualitative research

were first learned in your classroom as I studied how higher education and worldview

intermingled. Thank you for being a kind and diligent thesis advisor – it set me up for

success in my doctoral program in so many ways. And finally, thank you to you both for first envisioning and then running the IDEALS project over the last seven years – it would not have been possible for me to do this work without your work, and I am humbled to be able to offer a contribution to the growing based of literature about worldview diversity and interfaith engagement.

And to my chosen family in every state, thank you for your support and love throughout the years. My Ohio cohort – Dr. Laura, Dr. Antonio, and soon-to-be Drs.

Shannon, Lane, Courtney, Kaity, and Tiffany – I would not be where I am today without your support and encouragement. Thank you for everything, but most especially babies, buffalo chicken dip, angel poop, and always taking that cohort selfie. Tracey, thanks for the many Global Gallery work days and constant encouragement. My NYC stats buddy

and Ed.D. original, Dr. Chris Stipeck, thank you for sending encouragement via SMS

whenever possible – your dedication inspired my own. The larger IDEALS and CoIL

research teams, you deserve a special shout-out for collecting case study data for me and

just generally being awesome to work with – Shauna, Zak, Lini, Hooten, Lori, Kevin,

Helen, Graham, and of course Dr./Pastor/PostDoc Becky Crandall. To my bevy of higher

education humans, please know that your encouragement at every stage of this Ph.D.

journey has made a difference. Dr. Audrey Jaeger, Sarah Cantrell-Perkins, Aaron Hood,

Laura Hood, Dr. Jason Lynch, Dr. Sonja Ardoin, Marisa Mariano, Ben Jones, Courtney

Heywood, Vanessa Perez, Evan Gazdecki, and Dr. Nikki Charles – you rock!

I have also strongly benefitted from the support of two amazing church families

while I've pursued my degree. I will absolutely not be able to name everyone, but I will

make an effort. My Rock City team, and most especially Mitchell & Kelsey, Emily, Matt

& Julie, Katelyn, and Taylor & Jack – thank you all so much for helping me make a

home here in Ohio. My Liberty Church NYC family, you were so hard to leave when this

opportunity came up – thank you for releasing me into this season. Special shout-outs to

Tanz, Kari Sheets, Jenn, Janelle, Trish & Mark, Tim & Danielle, Raji, Dawn & Matt,

Bob & Mavis, Justin & Kristen, Jen & Bryan, Parker & Jessi, Kathryn, Angela, and Paul

& Andi for supporting me from afar and making time for coffee when our paths crossed.

Finally, while I'm not sure how I got so lucky to have a large crew of forever

friends, I must thank them as they've stuck with me to the end of the degrees! Lindz, Jer,

Kelz, Effrey, Kimmy, Matt, Lisa, Kevyn, Noëla, Joel, Kt, Mark, Bryan, Greg, Noel – little did we know how Fallston was fostering these relationships. Rob and Jules – thank you for letting me retreat to your family, and for all the encouragement your faces sent my way these last four years. Jessica Schulte, thank you for Noodles dates and grounding conversations about college ministry – it mattered for me to remember my roots.

There were so many shoulders I stood on to do this work, and I am so grateful to each of you for creating a foundation for me personally and professionally. The doctoral process has all types of moments – sometimes I needed a shelter, but others an anchor, sword, fireball, shield, a really good #lattelove or a really stiff drink… and I always had it. Thank you for being my tribe.

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Vita

2019 Doctor of Philosophy: Higher Education and Student Affairs

The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

2011 Master of Science: Higher Education Administration

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina

2004 Bachelor of Science: Logistics & International Business

University of Maryland – College Park, College Park, Maryland

2016 – Present Research Associate

Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey

The Ohio State University

2016 – Present House Director, Delta Delta Delta – Nu Chapter

The Ohio State University

2011 – 2016 Residence Hall Director

New York University

2009 – 2011 Resident Director

North Carolina State University

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Publications

Mayhew, M. J., Selznick, B. S., Zhang, L., Barnes, A., & Staples, B. A. (2018).

Developing undergraduates’ innovation capacities: Evidence from a curricular

experiment. Journal of Higher Education.

Staples, B. A., Jones, B., & Perez, V. (2018). Fostering engagement with social justice

through experiential learning. In Branch, K., Hart-Steffes, J., and Wilson, C. M.

(Eds.), Applying Student Development Theory Holistically. New York, NY:

Routledge.

Bryant Rockenbach, A., Bachenheimer, A., Conley, A. H., Grays, S., Lynch, J., Staples,

B. A., & Wood, A. (2014). Spiritual exchange in pluralistic contexts: Sharing

narratives across worldview differences. Journal of College and University

Student Housing. 41(1), 195-205.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Educational Studies

Specialization: Higher Education and Student Affairs

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments...... v Vita ...... viii List of Tables ...... xiv Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 Statement of the Problem ...... 5 Purpose of the Research ...... 7 Significance of the Study ...... 8 Overview of Implications for Research and Practice ...... 9 Overview of the Literature ...... 10 Public Institutions as Contexts for Encounters of Worldview Diversity ...... 11 A Complicated Relationship: Worldview on Campus ...... 12 Students and the Campus Worldview Environment ...... 14 Overview of Conceptual Framework ...... 17 Weick’s Organizational Sensemaking ...... 18 Critical Sensemaking (CSM) ...... 19 Definition of Terms...... 21 Background of the Study ...... 23 Research Design...... 23 Limitations ...... 25 Role of the Researcher ...... 25 Overview of Chapters ...... 26 Chapter 2. Literature Review ...... 28 Public Higher Education: A Context for Encountering Worldview Difference ...... 30 x

The National Context of Public Higher Education ...... 31 Public Institutions as Organizations...... 35 Summary ...... 43 A Complicated Relationship: Worldview on Campus ...... 44 Foundational Christian Privilege ...... 46 Secularization of the Public Campus ...... 49 Muddied Water: The Separation of Church and State ...... 53 Summary ...... 57 Students and the Campus Worldview Environment ...... 57 The Campus Climate for Worldview Diversity ...... 59 Student Connections Across Worldviews ...... 67 Summary ...... 75 Summary of Reviewed Literature ...... 76 Conceptual Framework: Critical Sensemaking ...... 79 Critical Sensemaking (CSM) ...... 81 Applications of Sensemaking and CSM ...... 88 Summary ...... 100 Chapter 3. Methods ...... 102 Making My Own Sense: Ontology and Epistemology ...... 103 Description of the Data: Student Sensemakers ...... 106 Brief Overview of IDEALS ...... 107 Description of the Participants ...... 109 Data Analysis: Noticing, Bracketing, and Labeling ...... 110 Content Analysis ...... 111 Data Interpretation and Reporting: Making Sense of the Findings ...... 116 Researcher in Context: Trustworthiness ...... 117 Summary ...... 118 Chapter 4. Findings ...... 120 Identity Construction ...... 120 Sensemaking Stories ...... 121 Analysis: Identity Construction ...... 128 Retrospective...... 130

Sensemaking Stories ...... 130 Analysis: Retrospective ...... 136 Creative Enactment ...... 137 Sensemaking Stories ...... 137 Analysis: Creative Enactment ...... 142 Social...... 144 Sensemaking Stories ...... 144 Analysis: Social ...... 151 Constant and Ongoing...... 152 Sensemaking Stories ...... 153 Analysis: Constant and Ongoing ...... 158 Extracted Cues ...... 159 Sensemaking Stories ...... 160 Analysis: Extracted Cues ...... 167 Plausibility ...... 168 Sensemaking Stories ...... 169 Analysis: Plausibility ...... 174 Formative Context ...... 175 Sensemaking Stories ...... 176 Analysis: Formative Context ...... 181 Structural Context ...... 182 Sensemaking Stories ...... 182 Analysis: Structural Context ...... 187 Discursive Context ...... 189 Sensemaking Stories ...... 189 Analysis: Discursive Context ...... 194 Summary ...... 195 Chapter 5. Discussion ...... 199 Review of the Study ...... 200 Discussion of Key Findings ...... 202 Students Seek New Sense ...... 203 Students are Highly Social Sensemakers ...... 205

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Institutional Sensegiving about Worldview Diversity ...... 209 Implications for Research: Making further Sense ...... 212 Implications for Practice: Giving further Sense ...... 215 Future Directions: Continued Ambiguity ...... 218 Limitations: Study in Context ...... 219 Conclusion ...... 220 References ...... 222 APPENDIX A: Focus Group Interview Protocol ...... 236 APPENDIX B: Demographics ...... 240 APPENDIX C: Process Flowchart ...... 245 APPENDIX D: Code Applications by Transcript ...... 246

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List of Tables

Table 1 Select Institutional Characteristics……………….……………………………109

Table 2 Student Participants by Institution and Worldview……………………………110

Table 3 Structural Coding Agenda...…………………………………………………...113

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Chapter 1. Introduction

A generation that has imagined the curvature of space need not boggle at the impossibility of imagining the consciousness of an incarnate God. (Lewis, 1952, p. 99)

My desire to understand how students at public institutions make sense of their encounters with people holding different worldviews is grounded in my own story.

Today, I identify as a devout Christian who engages her relationship with God both spiritually and religiously. I go to church every week, sometimes multiple times per week, and volunteer a minimum of eight hours a week as part of the team hosting Sunday church services. I donate at least ten percent of my yearly income to my spiritual communities. I read some part of the Christian Bible nearly every day and often lead groups to encourage others to do the same. I pray through several mediums –through a journal, silently, out loud, and with others. I believe in many things I cannot see including angels, healing, and heaven. And I have thought many times about the possibility of full- time ministry as a career trajectory. For me, my identity as a Christian began during the first year of my own undergraduate experience at a public institution.

I grew up vaguely Judeo-Christian, and my exposure to the rituals of religion were through the Chanukah celebrations of my Jewish cousins and my father’s stories of being required to learn We Three Kings in Latin as an altar boy in high school. Religion was distant and impersonal, something other people spent time doing. In today’s

terminology, I identified as a religious “none,” and personally had reflected so little on

the place of religion, spirituality, or faith in my own life that I would not have been able

to articulate my system of belief. Unbelief was my family’s normal and therefore mine as

well, at least publicly. Occasionally, I would quietly "try on" a belief system for a time and see if it "fit," much like walking around the store in a pair of sneakers before buying them. These were interesting trials but resulted in no lasting changes in my spiritual life.

The circumstances that shifted my question from “what are other people believing?” to “what do I believe?” were unexpected. During the summer before my senior year of high school, my mother’s heart rhythm failed on the way home from a weekend girls’ trip. Patricia Irene Staples was with us in this world one minute, and then so abruptly gone in the next minute. I had very little experience with death and no firm conceptions of the soul, heaven, hell, afterlife, or any of the other words that were about to come my way. “She’s so proud of you.” Is she? Can she still feel pride? “She’s watching over you.” Is that even possible? “She’s in a better place.” What place? And how is it better? And how do you know she’s there? So many questions, but really just one: what do I believe?

A thread woven throughout my senior year of high school was understanding what people believed, why they believed it, and how it informed their actions. In hindsight, I started seeking to understand peoples’ worldviews, or their “guiding life philosophy, which may be based on a particular religious tradition, a nonreligious perspective, ideological views, aspects of one’s cultural background and personal identity, or some combination of these” (Mayhew, Rockenbach, Correia, Crandall, & Lo,

2016, p. 2). While I could not yet articulate my own worldview, I started noticing when my peers’ foundational belief systems were different than my own. I decided I needed more knowledge than the peer interactions that my homogenous town provided, and so enrolled in a comparative religion honors seminar during my first semester at the state university I attended. While my knowledge of the world’s religions increased, it was through interactions in dining halls and after TV show watch parties that I really felt I gained an understanding of how others viewed the world. I also invested time studying

Christianity outside of class, as I realized I was interested in how these beliefs and values translated into actions.

While pursuing these various ideological tracks, I was also experiencing the first semester of college. I was not attending my 9am classes, fighting with my best friends from home about how often we talked, and worrying about how my family was doing without me at home. I was committed to exploring these beliefs, but there was a natural intermittence in my commitment. It would be difficult to explain exactly how all these threads coalesced into knowledge, but halfway through the semester it occurred to me that I knew enough. I had gained enough knowledge about Christianity to decide that if it was true, then I wanted to believe it. I no longer needed knowledge and had started to want faith. And suddenly, in one of those moments that seems to take forever but happens quickly, I decided to have faith and became a Christian. And for the last nineteen years, I have been figuring out exactly what that means.

I realized early on that my story was unique. While I knew many fewer people who decided to become Christian in college, I knew a great many people to decided they

3 were not Christians anymore. Some could point to a moment when they stopped believing and what prompted the change but most simply drifted away until they no longer felt attached. As someone who was itching to discuss questions of meaning and purpose, I learned to be less eager with those friends because they had lost one worldview but had not yet developed another and exploring the edges of belief was not fun for them.

Training sessions I was required to attend as a resident assistant or student groups dedicated to worldview exploration (e.g., a bible study, Hindu student group, philosophy club) were the only intentional spaces that facilitated dialogue about how beliefs affected daily life. It seemed strange to me that these values conversations were so far removed from the rest of my academic experience.

As I transitioned into professional roles in higher education, I began to experience some of the constraints that public, secular campuses manifest in relation to worldview.

As a new professional, I was confused about the right course of action for some of my students. For example, I remember asking a question about reworking an on-call schedule to be more friendly for Jewish staff members who observed the Sabbath. Everyone stopped their conversations and just looked at me, then someone weakly laughed and asked if there were any Jewish students on campus. Slowly, another peer asked if it would be appropriate to change the schedule as an accommodation if no one had asked for the change. In the moment, I dropped it, and decided I would observe the worldview environment closely before making any other suggestions. It was clear to me that this group of professionals had never really considered the worldview identities of their students or how they might influence our practice.

Throughout my higher education experience as a residence life professional and

graduate student, I have found that most of my colleagues do not share my worldview. In fact, most of my daily conversations are across worldviews, and though I often reflect on these conversations through the lens of my Christian belief system I rarely engage the other person in a co-constructed reflection. My perception is that many in higher

education have lost the ability to imagine productive worldview conversations, resulting

in greater understanding of both parties. And for some reason, we in student affairs are

not ready to tackle worldview the way we have previously tackled race, gender identity,

or sexuality. What is it about worldviews that makes everyone feel like they are walking

on eggshells?

I engaged in this study to see how students today are making sense of their

encounters across worldview differences. My sense from both my professional

experience and the literature is that students are interested in having these conversations

and that we, as researchers, student affairs staff, and faculty, have a responsibility to

create spaces where these connections can happen. Further, we need to be ready to be

participants in conversations across worldviews, which means we must do our own work

with this social identity. It is my hope that the results of this study offer insights that

allow a closer connection to emerge between students’ worldview development and the

college space.

Statement of the Problem

Public universities are identity and ideologically diverse (Cooperman, Smith, &

Ritchey, 2015; Jones & Cox, 2017), and students regularly interact across worldview

identity differences on their campuses (Rockenbach et al., 2018; Rockenbach et al.,

2017). Students have expectations that their campus environment supports exploration of

their own and others’ worldviews on campus (Astin, Astin, & Lindholm, 2011;

Chickering, Dalton, & Stamm, 2006; Nash, 2001). Broadly, society has expectations that

students graduate with greater citizenship capacities including the ability to connect

across ideological differences (Eck, 2001; Gutmann, 1987; Labaree, 1997). It has been

argued that public institutions have an increased responsibility to ensure that these

capacities are developed as part of their contribution to the nation’s public good

(Chickering et al., 2006; Cohen, 1998).

Currently, 7.3 million students attend public 4-year institutions in the United

States, accounting for 43% of all undergraduate students (NCES, 2018). However, public

institutions have had issues with supporting the worldview development of students

(Patel & Geiss, 2016; Rockenbach & Mayhew, 2014; Stewart, Kocet, & Lobdell, 2011).

Specifically, the histories of Christian privilege (Seifert, 2007; Blumenfeld, 2006;

Schlosser, 2003), secularism (Marsden & Longfield, 1992), and concepts like the

separation of church and state (Fairchild, 2009; Stamm, 2003) create contextual barriers

that influence the student experience of the worldview climate (Mayhew & Rockenbach,

2014). To date, no studies have examined the in-the-moment experience of student

encounters across worldview difference. We know that these encounters are happening

(Mayhew, Rockenbach, Correia, et al., 2016; Astin et al., 2011; Nash, 2001) and influence student perceptions of the campus climate and a number of other outcomes

(Rockenbach et al., 2017; Rockenbach et al., 2018). We do not know how students make

6 sense of their interactions across worldviews and how the contexts of higher education influence and shape this process.

Purpose of the Research

The purpose of this study is to explore how students make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity related to religion, spirituality, faith, and values at public institutions. I want to explore the in-the-moment experiences of students as they make sense of their encounters across worldview or with the campus worldview climate.

I also want to understand how the macro-context of higher education influences student sensemaking about worldview diversity. I am particularly interested in the context of public institutions due to the embedded influences of Christian privilege, secularism, and the separation of church and state. The research question that guides this study is: How do students at public institutions make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity?

I plan to explore how students describe making sense of worldview diversity on campus and how the institutional context impacts their sensemaking. It is my hope that this study will provide faculty, student affairs professionals, and administrators relevant information about how their students are already making sense of their interactions with worldview diversity on campus. Accordingly, I center the voices of students and their sensemaking processes in order to help public institutions make organizational sense of an increasingly worldview diverse campus.

In addition to addressing the research question, I have several goals I hope to accomplish as the result of this study. First, I intend to explore the application of critical

7 sensemaking as an appropriate conceptual framework for use in research on college students. Second, I propose to examine how the properties of critical sensemaking are illuminated in the context of focus groups. My third objective is to extend the literature concerning student perceptions of how worldview identities are supported or marginalized on public campuses.

Significance of the Study

The purpose of this study is to understand how students make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity. My hope is that this study will extend the scholarly conversation about worldview diversity on campus by using the critical sensemaking framework to explore how the institutional context influences student sensemaking. I intend for the results of this study to provide guidance to faculty and student affairs professionals to support students as they develop their own worldview commitments, pluralism orientations, and interfaith abilities. I believe higher education has untapped potential to better prepare graduates to be citizens who understand their own values and beliefs and can establish connections across ideological differences.

There are three major findings from this research. First, students tend to seek out the opportunity to shed old ways of being and knowing. While much of the sensemaking research to date has shown a tendency for organizational actors to lean into the status quo, this study showed that student sensemakers are inclined toward opportunities to change. Second, student sensemaking is highly social, and students often make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity through the lens of perceived social norms.

The social component of sensemaking was the most important to this group of students,

occurring more often in the data than either of the theoretically centered components of

identity construction or plausibility. Third, public higher education institutions are

sensegiving about worldview, power, privilege, and diversity either unintentionally or by

maintaining silence about these topics. Students perceived the university as a sensegiver

through how funding was allocated, who received priority for space, how offices were

staffed, and how worldview identity was considered compared to other social identities.

These findings significantly expand the literature about student sensemaking of

worldview diversity and offer several implications for research and practice.

Overview of Implications for Research and Practice

The results of this study offer three implications for research. First, the critical sensemaking (CSM; Helms Mills, Thurlow, & Mills, 2010) framework is appropriate and meaningful as conceptual theory for use with 1) worldview diversity encounters, 2) students as actors, and 3) focus groups as primary data sources. Each of these are new uses for CSM and respond to several recommendations from the literature (Aromaa et al.,

2018). Second, these results showed that four properties of sensemaking are most likely to present for student actors (social, plausibility, identity construction, extracted cues).

While this single study is not conclusive, these results indicated that the sensemaking behaviors of students expecting to experience development during college may be different than adults. Third, this study showed that the macro-context of public institutions does influence how students make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity. Further research should continue to explore how this influence manifests in the sensemaking of students or other organizational actors.

Additionally, there were some implications for practice that progressed from the findings of this study. The data revealed that social functioning and extracted cues were most often employed by student sensemakers to create plausible action steps after encounters with worldview diversity. Understanding what sensemaking property students are most likely to employ after labeling a set of circumstances as "different" can offer student affairs professionals and faculty relevant guidance for promoting students' worldview development. This study also showed how students perceived their public institutions as sensegivers about worldview diversity as part of their sensemaking. These insights allow institutions to evaluate some of these practices and innovate their sensemaking and sensegiving to better align with their mission, vision, and values.

Finally, this study continues to support previous recommendations (Mayhew &

Rockenbach, 2014; Astin et al., 2011; Stewart et al., 2011; Seifert, 2007; Nash, 2001) that practitioners and faculty need to be more prepared for students to want to make sense of these encounters and be encouraged in their own sensemaking and sensegiving capacities.

Next, I provide a brief overview of the literature that grounds this study.

Overview of the Literature

To frame this study, I first reviewed how public institutions serve as contexts for encounters with worldview diversity. I then looked at how the relationship between worldview and the campus environment developed over time, with particular interest on the way separation of church and state has been outworked on public campuses. Finally, I investigated what we know about student expectations and the campus worldview environment.

Public Institutions as Contexts for Encounters of Worldview Diversity

My approach to the literature was framed by my understanding of pluralism as an

active, engaging process that requires us to move beyond simple diversity, tolerance, or relativism to a deeper understanding of our own worldviews, a knowledge of the worldviews of others, and a vision for our collective identity. This definition is framed by

Eck’s (2001) concept of pluralism as an interactive and iterative process that allows one to maintain their own worldview while understanding another’s perspective. My personal experiences on public campuses indicated anecdotally the potential for rich encounters across worldview difference; I had experienced conversations and connections across worldviews nearly every day.

Accordingly, I first examined the demography of the national worldview landscape in which public higher education is situated. Recent research revealed that while just over 70% of the United States population identifies as Christian, the percentage of Christians is declining while every other worldview population is growing

(Cooperman et al.,2015). Additionally, the number of states where Christians are the majority worldview group has dropped from 39 to 23 between 2007 and 2016 (Jones &

Cox, 2017). Non-religious worldviews, including a newer category called “Nothing in particular” or “religious nones,” grew from 16% to 23% in a seven-year period

(Cooperman et al.,2015). Finally, the population ascribing to various minority worldviews now totals about 6% of the population (Cooperman et al.,2015).

I then looked for both similarities and differences in higher education contexts and found that college campuses are likely to be more worldview diverse. The millennial

11 generation currently populating campuses is the most religious diverse, including 8% worldview minority faiths and 36% religious nones (Jones & Cox, 2017). Recent college graduates indicated a sharper increase in religious nones than the national data (from 17% to 24%) and a sharper decrease in Christian identification (from 73% to 64%; Cooperman et al.,2015). Additionally, students identifying as Hindu, Unitarian/Universalist, or

Jewish are the most likely worldview groups to receive an undergraduate degree (Jones &

Cox, 2017). These numbers support my contention that students are likely encountering worldview diversity regularly in their college environments and highlight the need for college graduates to develop pluralism.

Finally, I considered how public higher education institutions function as organizations. As a first-hand observer, I know that change is difficult for these large, complex organizations. To examine how such institutions might respond to the increasing worldview diversity in their environments, I reviewed the organizational nature of public higher education institutions. I used examples from higher education’s history to highlight how worldview diversity has been connected to and disconnected from the undergirding goals of higher education. These examples also served to reinforce the appropriateness of public institutions as the context for exploring students experiences with worldview diversity.

A Complicated Relationship: Worldview on Campus

My personal interest in understanding how the current worldview environment evolved on public college campuses started as my own worldview story developed in those spaces. As an undergraduate, it felt like no one whose worldview was salient to

their identity felt like the campus was set up for their success. My non-religious friends

felt that Christianity was constantly in their faces, my worldview minority friends felt misunderstood in both academic and social spaces, and my Christian friends felt like their choices for abstinence were a constant source of ridicule. Later in life as a higher education professional, I found myself approaching worldview topics very cautiously with both students and staff because the appropriate way to have those conversations was unclear. The worldview environment on campuses felt messy, full of proverbial landmines, and guided by murky rules. I hoped that exploring the literature would help me understand how these circumstances had become normal within higher education.

I found that the worldview environment on public campuses is a complex mix of foundational Christian privilege (Blumenfeld, 2006; Schlosser, 2003) and operational secular norms (Marsden & Longfield, 1992). The origins of higher education in the

United States predispose campuses to operate from a Christian perspective, conferring unearned benefits to those who identify as Christian or operate easily within a Christian framework (Schlosser, 2003). Christian privilege manifests through basic structures of public campuses such as the academic calendar and assumed requirements for worldview practice (Seifert, 2007). In the second half of the twentieth century, the secularization movement that began at the close of World War I had pervaded higher education and overlaid the foundational Christian privilege with vaguely anti-religious secular operational norms (Marsden & Longfield, 1992). An additional influence on the campus worldview environment is the concept there be a separation of church and state. The constitutional mandate, which is often misunderstood (Lugo, Coooperman, & Stencel,

2010), is two-fold and requires that the state not establish a religion nor prevent any

person from practicing their religion (Fairchild, 2009). It seemed faculty and student

affairs professionals were often tasked with helping students navigate their worldview practice on campus and all parties experienced confusion due to real and perceived

constraints required to separate church from state (Fairchild, 2009; Seifert, 2007). The

story in the literature of how the worldview environment developed helped me envision

how these opposing forces might influence the student experience with worldview

diversity on a public campus.

Students and the Campus Worldview Environment

My approach to this literature base was grounded not only in my own experiences

as a student and staff member but also highly informed by my work as a research

associate examining interfaith interactions on college campuses. My student experiences

predisposed me to consider the college campus an excellent context for informally

connecting with other students across worldviews. During my undergraduate experience,

my worldview interactions with staff and faculty were not the most stimulating.

However, as a research associate, I have had the opportunity to see some excellent

programs and initiatives to foster connection across worldview on campus centered on

faculty and staff desires to share space with students in this way. With my own potential

biases in mind, I first reviewed research related to the climate for worldview diversity on

campus. Then, I explored what the literature says about students whose worldview

expressions are more active or public on campus. Finally, I described what recent

research about students' campus experiences with interfaith engagement and worldview

diversity has revealed.

The campus worldview climate was conceptualized by Rockenbach and Mayhew

(2014) as a function of student worldview identification (i.e. student characteristics), the representation of different worldviews on campus (i.e. structural worldview diversity), the support or lack of support for worldview expression (i.e. psychological climate), and encountering others holding different worldviews (i.e. behavioral climate). As the previous two sections covered in depth the potential worldview identification of students and the likelihood of wide representation on campus, I looked more closely at literature

examining the psychological and behavioral climates.

I began by exploring how students who are more publicly practicing their

worldviews perceive the campus climate. I was surprised by the lack of research about

the experiences of religious minority students in higher education. One set of authors

explored the Muslim student experience, first to understand the experiences of Muslim

women who veiled (Cole & Ahmadi, 2003) and then to see if the Muslim student

experience college differently than their Christian or Jewish peers (Cole & Ahmadi,

2010). Byrant (2005) used a demographic analysis to create an empirically-driven description of the worldview practices of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and

Unitarian Universalist students. Finally, a study exploring the meaning of spirituality across worldviews shared the experiences of six religious minority students, who described their practices in light of other worldviews (Mayhew, 2004). Turning to worldview majority students, broadly those who identify as Christian, I was struck again

15 by the lack of existing literature. I also found it interesting that researchers carefully defined or nuanced exactly the type of Christian student they studied, highlighting the heterogeneity of the worldview majority group (e.g., Bryant, 2011; Hammond & Hunter,

1984). This body of work highlighted the difficult or othering experiences of Christian students on campus while attempting to integrate these experiences into the broader picture of Christian privilege (Bowman & Small, 2010; Bryant, 2011; Moran, Lang, &

Oliver, 2007).

A common thread I noted throughout these studies was the impact of peer interactions on students’ perceptions of their worldview climate, which is why I next explored research concerning student connections across worldviews, or interfaith engagement. Many of the early studies involved gathering empirical evidence to support the idea that worldview interactions should happen on campus (Astin et al., 2011; Astin et al., 2005; Chickering et al., 2006; Nash, 2001). Later researchers were able to build on this foundation to explore the impact of interfaith engagement on students including their perceptions of the campus worldview climate (Mayhew, Bowman, & Rockenbach, 2014), how they appreciate students holding other worldviews (Mayhew, Rockenbach, &

Bowman, 2016), and how they perceive their campus as welcoming for students of various worldview identities (Mayhew et al., 2017). Interfaith engagement influences how committed students are to their own worldviews and how their pluralism orientation develops over the first year of college (Rockenbach et al., 2018). Taken together, the literature points to the effects of student encounters across worldview differences, but no studies to date have examined the in-the-moment experience of these encounters.

Overview of Conceptual Framework

As a guide for this study, I chose a framework that would help examine the

process that students were going through in the actual moments of their encounters with

worldview difference. From my own story, I understood how an encounter with

worldview difference could be extremely nuanced both by the individuals and by the

context of the encounter. Therefore, I looked for theories that could help me understand

the process of students who were situated within institutions that were in turn situated

within the wider contexts of the nation and world.

Critical sensemaking was designed to understand how members of a specific

organization make sense of change contextualized by the formative, structural, and

discursive contexts of a given organization (Helms Mills et al., 2010). I chose CSM as the

conceptual framework for this study because it provided guidance on examining the more

granular process of how students make sense of their cross-worldview encounters. At the same time, it offered a mechanism for understanding how their processes might be influenced by the institutional and national contexts. Additionally, I was inspired by the theory to consider how sensemaking was part of a mutually constituted relationship between students and their institutions.

An extension of Weick’s (1995) organizational sensemaking, CSM maintained the original properties of identity construction, retrospection, creative enactment, social,

constant and ongoing, extracted cues, and plausibility while incorporating contextual components to frame the process of making sense as situated within and influenced by the broader environment (Helms Mills et al., 2010, p. 188). The dual foci of decision-

making and context served to illuminate student encounters with worldview diversity in

the complicated context of public higher education. This section provides an overview of how CSM evolved from Weick’s organizational sensemaking theory.

Weick’s Organizational Sensemaking

Organizational sensemaking was the social construction of order that is plausible, informed by experience, and increases clarity about further next steps (Weick, 1993). The need to “make sense” was instigated by organizational actors (i.e. employees,

administrators, students, trustees) recognizing that they are encountering difference

instead of same-ness. Precursory sensemaking steps include noticing and bracketing, the

conscious acknowledgement that a set of circumstances are different and have a defined

scope, and labeling, or naming the circumstances collectively to give them shape (Weick,

Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). Assigning a label makes the circumstances more concrete to

the organizational actor, who then engages in sensemaking to find a navigable and

plausible path forward (Weick, 1995).

Weick (1995) identified seven properties that describe the sensemaking of

organizational actors as they proceed through their normal, regular routines: 1) identity

construction, meaning the constructed identity of an individual or organization will varies

by personal interpretation; 2) retrospective, meaning that sense is derived when actions

are reflected upon; 3) creative enactment, meaning that communication or action become

meaningful objects evaluated within a specific environmental context; 4) social, meaning

that an action or communication is ascribed sense through individual thinking and social

functioning; 5) constant and ongoing, meaning that sense is subject to salience at the time

18 of reflection rather than when it occurs; 6) extracted cues, meaning that only actions or communications noticed by an individual impact their sensemaking; and 7) plausibility, meaning the goal is to determine a set of reasonable next steps rather than a complete and accurate understanding of events. Weick’s original focus was the retrospective nature of sensemaking and later work highlights the importance of prospective or projected sensemaking important processes for identity construction and plausibility (Weick et al.,

2005).

Weickian sensemaking has been used to study higher education change processes

(Kezar, 2013; Kezar & Eckel, 2002; Gioia & Thomas, 1996; Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991), which showed that sensemaking was useful for examining the processes of organizational actors whose environments were changing. It has also been used to study decision- making among administrators (Eddy, 2003; Zerquera, Ballysingh, & Templeton, 2017), faculty (Chadwick & Pawlawski, 2007; Gonzalez, 2013; Hora, 2008; O’Meara, Lounder,

& Campbell, 2014; Trowler & Knight, 2000; Wright, 2005), and graduate students

(Suspitsyna, 2013; Tomlinson & Egan, 2002). Many of these authors found that increasing structural diversity in any way forces organizational members to ask the question “same or different” (Weick et al., 2005) and then create a plausible story that allows them to move forward.

Critical Sensemaking (CSM)

Helms Mills et al. (2010) introduced CSM as a frame for analyzing for what makes certain actions or beliefs the most plausible to an organizational actor by analyzing the macro-level contexts in which sensemaking occurs. CSM maintained Weick’s (1995)

original seven sensemaking properties while addressing two limitations of the original

theory. First, Helms Mills et al. (2010) clarified the epistemological grounding of CSM

would be a triangulation of interpretivist, poststructural, and critical theories, moving

entirely away from some post-positivist notions present in Weickian sensemaking.

Next, CSM addressed an under-focus on the societal contexts of organizations by placing identity construction of both individuals and organizations as the central property

(Aromaa et al., 2018). CSM additionally broadened Weickian sensemaking to include an

examination of the macro-context that makes certain actions or beliefs the most plausible

to an organizational actor. The macro-context includes the formative, structural, and

discursive contexts of an organization. Formative contexts are structures that constrain

possible courses of action with a given society; structural contexts are the rules governing how work is accomplished within an organization; and discursive contexts are underlying narratives that influence available options. The addition of macro-context components positioned CSM as a more useful heuristic for analyzing organizations

(Helms Mills et al., 2010).

Weick et al. (2005) proposed that examining the role of power and how it influences organizational actors as they seek plausible stories would enhance the framework by offering deeper insight about who has “control over cues, who talks to whom, proffered identities, criteria for plausible stories, actions permitted and disallowed, and histories and retrospect that are singled out” (p. 418). CSM has been shown as an effective means to examine these influences. Aromaa et al. (2018) reviewed

15 years of research studies employing CSM including many that focused on the

sensemaking of individuals. One set of studies focused on the agency of organizational

actors to enact the macro-context as part of their sensemaking while another examined

how the cognitive position of an individual within the macro-context influenced their sensemaking (Aromaa et al., 2018, pp. 61-62).

Rationale for CSM. I chose CSM as my framework for studying how students make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity on public campuses because it has been used in studies with similarly complex contexts. CSM provided a theoretical grounding that allowed me to connect the sensemaking activities of students to the broader societal context to see where power and privilege structures are influencing the sensemaking process (Mills et al., 2010). Additionally, CSM helped frame the influence of the macro-context on student sensemaking as potential action steps for higher

education professionals. Faculty and student affairs staff need to understand these

influences to provide the best developmental supports as campus environments continue

to diversify and include more students ascribing to different worldviews.

Definition of Terms

There are several terms that I use throughout this dissertation that have a specific

meaning within the context of this study. While many of these terms were defined by

other researchers within the literature, it is my hope that this section reveals any nuances

that I have added to them throughout the course of this work. To that end, I review the

definitions of key terms and explain how I have operationalized them throughout this

document.

I use the term worldview to describe an individual’s “guiding life philosophy,

which may be based on a particular religious tradition, a nonreligious perspective,

ideological views, aspects of one’s cultural background and personal identity, or some

combination of these” (Mayhew et al., 2017). Personally, the term worldview fits across

the belief systems I have held throughout my story. It is broad where terms like religion,

faith, or philosophy are narrow, and my nuanced definition places greater importance on

individuality and unique aspects that might comprise a worldview. Therefore, I will

occasionally use a term like religion or philosophy if the goal is to emphasize the

commonality of a belief system.

The campus worldview climate was defined by Rockenbach and Mayhew (2014) as the student characteristics, structural diversity, psychological climate, and behavioral

climate that influence students’ experiences with worldview diversity and interfaith

engagement on their campuses. In addition to this term and definition, I use campus

worldview environment as a broader term that accounts for national context and the

community outside of the campus. Another related term, campus worldview landscape, is slightly narrower and describes the student characteristics and structural diversity components of the worldview climate.

The term sensemaking emerges from both Weickian organizational sensemaking and critical sensemaking theories. Sensemaking was defined by Weick (1993) as the social construction of a plausible order that accounts for the maximum amount of experiential information while reducing equivocality to the lowest possible degree; the seven components of sensemaking were originally associated with this definition. Later,

Helms Mills et al. (2010) continued using the term sensemaking to describe the process

of individuals and organizations co-constructing identity and order from the flux of daily

activity while adding a theoretical consideration that sensemaking happens within an influential macro-context. The process of sensemaking considering the influence of the macro-context is critical sensemaking. However, the authors continued to use the simpler sensemaking to describe the situated process of making sense, and that is how I used the term throughout this study.

Background of the Study

This study used data from the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes

Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS), a longitudinal, mixed-methods study exploring student

outcomes related to worldview diversity and interfaith engagement. During the third

phase of the project, the IDEALS research team gathered qualitative data at 18

institutions using a multiple case study method (Stake, 2006). I will use the qualitative

data from the five public institutions included in the sample to investigate how students

make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity at public institutions.

Research Design

This study concentrates on the student experiences at five public institutions that participated in the case study portion of the IDEALS project. Geographically, two institutions were in the South, two in the Midwest, and one in the West. Because the geographical areas are similar, the following reference names will be used throughout this study: Heartland State, Midwest University, Southeast State, Southern University, and West University. I used the audio recordings and transcripts of only the student focus

groups in order to examine how students themselves are reflecting their sensemaking

processes. The 15 focus group transcripts include the voices of 60 students across the five institutions, thus offering a rich but diverse subset of data for analysis.

I use content analysis (Mayring, 2000) to examine this dataset. First, I engaged in a deductive structural coding process to apply a priori codes based on the critical sensemaking concept (Saldaña, 2016). This type of coding was ideal for transcripts generated by semi-structured interview protocols and conducive for use with a specific conceptual framework. Next, I used an inductive concept coding process to examine how individual behaviors and actions related to critical sensemaking came together as a class or category (Saldaña, 2016). Concept coding typically moves beyond an observable behavior to suggest an idea or a process, and for this study the emergent ideas were best classified using process codes. To best answer my research question, all results are drawn from the first coding treatment.

Content analysis was an appropriate procedure to explore sensemaking because both are processes that create creating order out of flux (Saldaña, 2016; Weick, 1993).

Though the structural coding process used an a priori code-set based on the critical sensemaking theory, Mayring's (2000) content analysis process encourages the researcher to make sense of the data iteratively and revise the coding agenda throughout the analysis. It allows for constant and ongoing sensemaking of the data both retrospectively and creatively enacted with data in the present, three hallmarks of the sensemaking structure. Additionally, the goal of content analysis is to reduce the data until the results are revealed (Mayring, 2000), which is akin to the central sensemaking component of

identity construction. These parallels helped easily fit content analysis to both the data

and the theoretical framework.

Limitations

There were several limitations to this study. First, I was only able to explore the

sensemaking verbalized by students through the focus groups. Sensemaking is a process of knowing, and since what is known is not always verbalized, there may be some key elements of student sensemaking that were not revealed through this study. Second, choosing critical sensemaking as the framework for this study focused the results on student process and institutional context, which may ignore other important aspects of cross-worldview encounters (e.g., meaning making, activism, moral development). Third, this study only included students at public institutions, which may limit the applicability

of the findings to other contexts. Fourth, organizational sensemaking was evaluated

through the medium of student voices. It is possible that aspects of organizational

sensemaking remained hidden despite the students shared dynamic information sharing in the focus group setting. Finally, there are myriad potential limitations inherent in the process of a secondary data analysis. It is my hope that sharing these limitations frame how this study can and cannot be applied to other contexts (Marshall & Rossman, 2016).

Role of the Researcher

I have intentionally shared my own story throughout this introduction and will continue to frame the work with my personal lens throughout this dissertation. While I participated in some of the collection processes that created this dataset, I recognize I am

serving as the meaning-making instrument for all of the data included in this study

(Marshall & Rossman, 2016). Therefore, to understand how the results of this study have

emerged from the raw data, I must be transparent about my perspectives because who I am informs how I make sense of the world (Patton, 2002), and therefore how I ultimately

interpret the sensemaking of these students.

As a worldview researcher, I often consider my held identities as the lenses

through which I view the world. I identify as a white, cisgender, heterosexual woman

from a well-educated, middle class family. I was born in the United States and am a

native English speaker. I identify as Christian but grew up religiously nothing in

particular. I recognize that I hold many privileged identities and have regularly

participated in activities and exercises designed to unpack and understand privilege. I see

the world, including this work, through these lenses and share them with you to be

authentic with my approach to this data, analysis, and interpretation.

Overview of Chapters

The next four chapters outline the literature base, methodology, findings, and

discussion of my inquiry into how students make sense of their encounters with

worldview diversity. In Chapter 2 of this dissertation, I review literature related to public

institutions as contexts for worldview diversity, the history and evolution of the current

worldview climate on college campuses, and the literature exploring student worldview

engagement on campus. I then provide a review of critical sensemaking (CSM) including

Weick's (1995) original conception and Helms Mills et al.’s (2010) expansion of the

original framework to include a critical component that explores how organizational actors’ sensemaking is influenced by the macro-context. I then review relevant

26 applications of sensemaking and CSM and conclude with an explanation of why CSM is an appropriate framework for this study.

In Chapter 3, I first describe my epistemology and approach to this work. Then, I describe the data source I used for this study and provide a description of the data. Next, I move to a description of the content analysis I used to examine the data and the specifics of my analysis process via structural and concept coding (Saldaña, 2011). I then discuss relevant aspects of my own sensemaking process as I interpreted and reported the findings. Finally, I shared the strategies used to ensure trustworthiness during this study.

I present the findings by sensemaking component and review how the various goals of this study were achieved in Chapter 4. Through the structural coding phase of the content analysis, each component of sensemaking and influence of the macro-context was evident through the student focus groups. To understand how students were making sense of their encounters with worldview diversity, I review each component separately and share exemplar quotes that showcase the component or influence through student stories, followed by a brief analysis. This serves to showcase the intersection between the sensemaking component or influence and the students' experience.

In Chapter 5, I conclude the dissertation with a discussion of three key findings: students tend to seek new sense through worldview encounters, students are highly social sensemakers of worldview diversity, and institutions sensegive about worldview both actively and passively. I then share how this work extends the current literature, the implications for research and practice, and potential future directions for this work. After reviewing the existing limitations of this work, I close with some final thoughts.

Chapter 2. Literature Review

We in higher education must be very careful to consider the intellectual needs and rights of all students, both secular and religious, believing and disbelieving. (Nash, 2001, p. 151)

As a second year Master’s student in the spring of 2010, I had the opportunity to

take a new special topics course about spirituality in higher education. The first

assignment was to construct and share a “spiritual autobiography” to consider how we

had come to hold our current worldviews. As we came together on the second week to

share our work, I realized that all twelve students completed the assignment despite

holding worldviews that spanned the gamut of religious and non-religious perspectives.

We had all experienced worldview-related journeys, and many of our stories highlighted episodes from our undergraduate years. And it seemed that having space to simply share about our ideological identity on campus was novel to us all.

What was it that made that exercise different than my other experiences engaging with people about their worldviews on campus? I identified several unique components including the openness of the classroom setting to worldview discussions, the participation of the professor, the emphasis on the evolution of everyone’s current beliefs, and the listening posture we shared as classmates. The structure of this assignment was allowing us space to engage our worldview identities as other spaces had allowed me to engage my racial, gender, and class identities.

I also realized that the work of integrating my worldview into my work as a

higher education professional was far from complete, and my work-life in this area was

far more compartmentalized than with other social identities. I was overwhelmed with

what this realization meant for me and my future work – how would I help create space

for students on public campuses to explore all their identities, including their

worldviews? What if some of their beliefs ran counter to mine? Or the institution? What

if it got messy and someone was hurt in the process? Where could I get help with these

questions? Some of my reflections were self-revelatory and helped me understand how

my worldview development has been shaped by educational experiences comprised

entirely at secular, non-denominational institutions in the public sphere. As someone who made a clear decision to have faith on a public college campus, I have wrestled since then with how that faith can "show up" as part of my life and work. I frequently found myself

exploring the written and unwritten rules for separating church and state when applied at

the individual level, within conversations with students, and as part of department or

university policies.

I perceived the public campus as having multiple standards for “allowable” worldview engagement, complexly rooted in the mission and operating standards of these institutions, the expectations of the students coming to college, and the history of worldview in the campus environment. In my endeavors to make sense of how my own

worldview should inform, impact, and adjust my professional work on campuses, I kept

returning to these threads of knowledge. Therefore, to ground and inform this study, I

investigated how the public institutions serve as contexts for encounters with worldview

diversity, how the relationship between worldview and the campus environment

developed over time, and what we know about student expectations of and experiences in the campus worldview environment.

Public Higher Education: A Context for Encountering Worldview Difference

Pluralism requires the cultivation of public space where we all encounter one another. Where are those public spaces? Certainly universities where the curricular and non- curricular issues of multiculturalism are boiling on the front burner. (Eck, 1993b, p. 7)

I first encountered the term “pluralism” in college and almost immediately re-

defined it as universalism, or the idea that all ideological paths should be respected but

understood to ultimately transcend difference and lead to the same end (Nash, 2001). I

immediately rejected this view because it seemed to dismiss and make meaningless my

own decision to be part of one ideological community over another. I staunchly did not

believe that every path had the same end. However, I did want a philosophy for engaging

with people who believed differently than me that maintained respect for their beliefs

without requiring that I believe in this third, universalist principle. At this time, most of

my friends and family were not Christian and cross-worldview interactions were more frequent than within-group interactions. I sought for some unifying principle during my two undergraduate world religions courses as we learned about the basic tenets of belief, faith, and practice of well-known religious and non-religious perspectives. Though these classes focused on the various lenses people used to view the world, we spent little time talking about our own worldviews in relationship to them or how to handle encountering worldview differences in our daily lives.

In graduate school I discovered my inner pluralist. I was reintroduced to the concept of pluralism and how it is specifically different than universalism through my seminar about spirituality in higher education. I read Diana Eck’s (2001) description of pluralism as “the dynamic process through which we engage with one another in and through our very deepest differences” (p. 70) and her proposal that pluralism goes beyond diversity, tolerance, and relativism to an active and iterative understanding of our individual and collective identity. This definition resonated with me personally as someone who frequently found herself in conversations across worldview identities.

Additionally, as a higher education administrator for several years, I noticed that students’ worldviews often influenced their campus experiences, but they had no forum to discuss or explore this part of their identity. The next section describes the national worldview context of public higher education to highlight the need for developing pluralism among college students on public campuses.

The National Context of Public Higher Education

My first questions about the national worldview context were compositional – what did the numbers say about worldview diversity across the country? Recent national data from 2014 and 2016 reveals that while the country remains largely Christian, the demography is indeed becoming more diverse over time (Jones & Cox, 2017; Cooperman et al.,2015). While just over 70% of adults in the U.S. identified as Christian in 2014, that percentage represents a decrease of around 7% since 2007 (Cooperman et al.,2015). In the same seven-year period, the religiously unaffiliated group comprised of Atheists,

Agnostics, and those who identify as “Nothing in particular” (or, religious “nones”) has

increased by seven points to 23%, and those of other religious faiths have seen a 1%

increase to about 6% of the total population. There have also been notable composition

shifts in the Christian population from 2007 to 2016, including: a 5% or more decline in the number of white Christians, an increase in the non-white Protestant and Catholic populations to 33% and 36% respectively, and a drop from 39 to 23 in the number of states that are majority Christian (Jones & Cox, 2017). My impression from these data was that worldview diversity is increasing across the country, primarily from people transitioning worldviews (notably Christian to religious none) or through immigration from non-Christian nations.

In terms of higher education, the data supports my impression that the college campus is likely to be more worldview diverse than the national numbers. The number of college graduates identifying as “religious nones” has grown from 17% in 2007 to 24% in

2014, and concurrently the number of Christian-identified graduates has dropped from

73% to 64% in the same period (Cooperman et al.,2015). Those unaffiliated with religion attain differently by group, with about 42% of Atheists and Agnostics attaining at least a

4-year degree versus 31% of the total unaffiliated population (Jones & Cox, 2017). While

Christian-identified students may constitute the majority of college attendees, students identifying as Hindu, Unitarian/Universalist, or Jewish are most likely to attain four-year degrees at 69%, 65%, and 61% respectively (Jones & Cox, 2017). Additionally, there is more worldview diversity in the youngest of the millennial generation with 36% unaffiliated, 36% Protestant, 16% Catholic, 8% other faiths, and 3% other Christian faiths

(Cooperman et al.,2015) than in any prior generations. These numbers indicate to me that

32 the national worldview landscape is magnified on public college campuses, creating contexts particularly ripe for student encounters across worldview difference.

Additionally, these numbers are evidence of continued shifts in the worldview landscape that reinforce Eck’s (2001) contention that “the process of pluralism is never complete but is the ongoing work of each generation” (p. 72). Perhaps prompted by the increased worldview diversity on their campuses, students have been consistently clear over the last two decades that they desire to discuss values, purpose, and meaning as it relates to their chosen worldview (Astin et al., 2011; Nash, 2001; Rockenbach et al.,

2018). This is a marked change from the late twentieth century when many predicted that, in the face of secularization, religion and spirituality would leave not only campus but the nation entirely (Marsden & Longfield, 1992). Instead, students have expressed high interest in discussing spirituality or religion formally or informally while in college

(Astin et al., 2011; Astin et al., 2005; Rockenbach et al., 2017) and shown growth on other college outcomes (e.g. sense of belonging, academic achievement, global citizenship) when they are engaging in these types of activities (Astin et al., 2011;

Rockenbach et al., 2017; Rockenbach et al., 2018). These studies show that students want to understand themselves, their fellow students (and future neighbors and colleagues), and their place in the world in light of their ideologies. It seems this generation acknowledges the increasing ideological diversity of the citizenry and is interested in developing its capacity for worldview pluralism. Furthermore, they consider the college campus a good context for pluralistic worldview engagement.

Approximately 7.3 million students are enrolled in the 698 public institutions

granting 4-year degrees in the United States each year – approximately 43% of the total

undergraduate enrollment (NCES, 2018). While all higher education institutions are

affected by changes in the national landscape, public institutions are more closely tied to

public decision-making through legislation, court decisions, and funding sources and the

expectation that they serve the public interest for diverse types of educational

environments (Schmidtlein & Berdahl, 2011). Each college or university’s history

informs how students, faculty, and staff experience and uphold the current norms and

engage with the future aspirations of the institution. The mission-driven accountability

structure of public higher education has caused these institutions to respond to an

increasingly broad range of economic, social, and cultural changes in the U.S.

(Schmidtlein & Berdahl, 2011), including the reorganization of departments focused on

students’ belief systems (Eck, 2001).

As a student affairs professional at five universities, I have experienced how

various differentiated institutional identities were communicated to staff members and

reinforced through policies, programming, and personnel decisions. However, I also

noticed how the standards and processes regarding student admissions, faculty and staff

recruitment, research dollars, and institutional accreditation were aligned closely to

comparable institutions in order to stay competitive. In terms of changes made in

response to a more diverse worldview landscape, public institutions are especially interesting because, as government entities, they were more affected by the concurrent

outworking of the separation of church and state and influx of students with diverse

worldviews through immigration (Marsden, 1994). These institutions’ accountability-

based governance structures predispose them to respond to environmental changes

(Schmidtlein & Berdahl, 2011), making them ideal for examining student interactions with and reactions to worldview diversity. Essentially, though they have become pluralistic microcosms of the national worldview landscape, public higher education institutions have struggled to create space for Eck’s (2001) notion of pluralism and move beyond mere tolerance of diverse worldviews. The next section examines these institutions as organizations to contextualize change processes on public campuses.

Public Institutions as Organizations

Within the last decade the term “failure” has been used to describe the state of higher education and its ability to prepare graduates for the workforce (Atkinson, 2010;

Morrison, 2015), improve the equity of enrollments for students of color (Ashkenas,

Park, & Pearce, 2017), and foster campus environments where connection across diversity is prevalent (Bruni, 2015; Vidal-Ortiz, 2017). Recently, it has seemed that higher education institutions have been more associated with failure than success. Part of the problem with achieving success is deciding who gets to define it – these institutions function as non-profits but have direct stakeholders in the public, private, and government sectors. I have wondered which measures are used to determine the practices that make public institutions successful and which the institution should change or terminate. And, more personally, what the expectations for my own contributions are to that success.

As someone who has worked primarily with students, I can see how institutions

are not only entwined with the private sector as the primary benefactors of highly-

educated graduates and as an increasingly-frequent financial partner for research and operations (Fang, 2017; Seltzer, 2017) but also have a responsibility to enhance the

workforce. As an administrator, I understand that most institutions are influenced by

local, state, or federal governments through research funding, governance structures,

financial aid dollars, or legal oversight requirements (e.g., Title IX, FERPA, HIPPA) and

additionally have a responsibility to maximize public investments. I approached the

literature to understand how organizations, like public higher education institutions,

tended to react to environmental changes such as increasing worldview diversity on

campus. I came to understand public institutions as complex organizations that adapt to

their environments, respond to environmental feedback, and evolve when needed to

survive.

Public institutions as complex organizations. Birnbaum (1988) conceptualized

higher education institutions as complex organizations due to the unique shared governance structures of academia: faculty, administration, and management. This three-

part governance structure helps frame the many functions of a college or university, such

as teaching students, producing new knowledge, developing citizens, positively

impacting the community, rallying alumni, and graduating competent members of the workforce. In this framework, students could be considered the primary resource "input"

coming into organizations, which then transform those students over their college

experience and "output" them back into the workforce and society. Many campuses track

career and graduate program placements, starting salaries, and alumni giving (Mayhew,

Rockenbach, Bowman, Seifert, & Wolniak, 2016) as part of framing their success to the public.

I found it interesting that Birnbaum’s (1988) organizational structure framed students as the inputs, when I believe the student-institution relationship is much more

complex. While they are an input, they are also the consumer, the product, and part of the

governance structure. For example, public higher education has often pursued specific

diversity, equity, and social justice goals due to environmental forces expressed through

the study body (Jayakumar, Garces, & Park, 2018). Policies and practices changed as

student demographics changed on campus, as students increased demand for content

delivered via new technology, or as students demanded equity-oriented practices for all

students, faculty, and staff. In organizational literature, change processes that are

instigated due to environmental factors are usually concerned with repositioning the

organization within a given market (Kezar & Eckel, 2002; Porter, 2008). Typically,

organizations that are unable to adapt, respond, or evolve will generally fail, which has

happened en masse several times in U.S. higher education history following significant

environmental changes (Cohen, 1998).

Adaptive to environments. While there are many potential examples of adaptation within public universities, I found the changes in faculty management

structure over time an instructive example of the adaptive nature of these organizations.

Early in higher education’s history, the only faculty member of a college may have also

been the founder, president, teacher, administrator, and student life director (Cohen,

1998). As enrollments grew, tutors were added to teach classes, then professors to expand

the number of courses, then professors with specialized areas of focus, and eventually the

current system of professorial rankings from instructor to full professor were in place.

Cohen (1998) describes how students were demanding more specialized coursework options, which resulted in the faculty adapting to offer advanced coursework in

mathematics, natural science, and arts courses. This quick response to adapt to a new

environmental demand began to legitimize faculty roles as career destinations, setting the

stage for additional environmental shifts as professionalization continued and the

research university concept transformed higher education in the United States.

A key adaptation for faculty at public institutions was in response to the broadened scope of publicly-funded universities (Birnbaum, 1988). As research and development emerged as important products of public universities during the Cold War, the production of research joined the traditional work of informing the workforce and citizenry as ways for these institutions to contribute to the public good (Cohen, 1998).

However, as the rising importance of research engaged faculty more fully in that work, it narrowed their decision-making scope in regard to admissions, accreditation, finances, public relations, and student life resulting in the current triune human resource structure of faculty, administration, and management (Birnbaum, 1988; Cohen, 1998).

These two examples highlight how adaptation is one response to one environmental force, not a comprehensive response to a changed environment. There are several related environmental factors that have affected faculty structures over time including increased enrollments, the professionalization of the professoriate, an emphasis

38 on research, shifted recruitment and retention practices, and the increased number of non- tenure track instructors (Cohen, 1998). An example of adaptation related to worldview diversity is when public institutions allowed Catholic Newman Centers, Jewish Hillels, and Baptist Campus Ministries to flourish next to their campuses in the mid-twentieth century but did not overhaul their campus chaplain systems – the environmental pressure existed for one but not the other (Eck, 2001; Nash, 2001).

Responsive to environmental feedback. I found the origin story of higher education institutions important because it highlighted the environmental constraints through which colleges and universities must operate. Additionally, the story helped situate the evolution of worldview diversity on campus. As higher education dawned in

North America, colleges were founded using a combination of two European approaches: support by specific church denominations to provide training for future clergy and an enlightened ideal that classic texts could expand the mind and inform daily life (Cohen,

1998). The first college founders and students were white Christian men, often from reasonably affluent families, pursuing a post as a minister, doctor, lawyer, or other specialized profession (Horowitz, 1987). The initial expectation was that college was a place for white, Protestant-Christian men. Horowitz (1987) described how affluent

“college men” dominated the social spaces of campus with fraternities, secret societies, and football. The environment of colonial America provided no feedback that indicated college should not be built around the affluent, white, Christian, male experience, and so the small number of Jewish, Catholic, and Black students enrolled in college had no expectations that college men would learn to tolerate them. These “outsiders” were

thrown together with the poorer students focused on their academics (Horowitz, 1987, p.

123).

Gender was the first social identity that generated enough environmental feedback

to cause an industry-wide response as college-going became a socially acceptable next step for affluent women in the 1920s (Horowitz, 1987). Institutions’ capitalized on the women’s empowerment movement, strong economy, and changing social systems of post-World War I America by finding space on campus for women (Cohen, 1998). Some institutions accepted women into their ranks in ways that were socially equivalent to the men already on campus, and affluent, white, Christian women who were “ready for fun” organized themselves into sororities and other campus activities (Horowitz, 1987, p.

127). Women who did not fit this mold became a brand of outsider on traditional campuses or pursued a different path at one of newer women’s colleges. Old line institutions like Harvard and Columbia, not yet ready to fully integrate women into their campus life, created Radcliffe and Barnard as affiliated spaces for women to learn and take their exams (Cohen, 1998). The societal stance concerning women on campus was that they could “remain safely feminine even when exposed to higher education away from the protection of home” and that college would serve as a “waystation to a proper marriage” (Horowitz, 1987, p. 201). The campus response was measured by the level of environmental feedback, and so women had access to campus but were generally expected to continue fulfilling their conventional duties in American society.

Race was the next social identity to cause enough environmental feedback to prompt a response from higher education institutions. The requirement for “separate but

equal” access for Black students emerged after the Civil War and was initially met by

adding a set of institutions exclusively for Black students (Cohen, 1998). First, over fifty private colleges were founded specifically to enroll Black students through the efforts of various Christian churches and community foundations. Then, the second Morrill Act in

1890 required “separate but equal” public institutions if states planned to deny admission to established land grant institutions based on race, which resulted in 17 new public institutions (Cohen, 1998, p. 111). Societal norms, Jim Crow laws, and economic oppression meant segregation remained the norm for Black students on college campuses until the civil rights era (Jayakumar et al., 2018).

My understanding of these organizational responses was that they assuaged, for the moment, the environmental feedback without changing anything more than necessary.

In a complex organization, more than adaptation or responsiveness was needed to fully respond to an environmental shift (Birnbaum, 1988). In these examples, the clear hierarchy placing affluent, white, Christian men as the primary users of campus spaces was established through social practices in the colonial college era and was not displaced for hundreds of years. The post-college success of these students, as defined by societal norms, reified their hegemonic influence in campus spaces over that of other users (i.e., poor students, women, Blacks, Jews; Witherspoon & Crawford, 2014). Essentially, while women and Black students were added to the higher education landscape, the success of the institution remained tied to the success of white, Protestant men. In my experience, there was a similar worldview parallel in that many belief systems are officially welcome

on campus but the success of the Mulsim, Sik’h, Humanist, or Hindu students was not

tied in a meaningful way to the success of the institution.

Evolutionary to survive the environment. For complex organizations, evolution

occurs when the environment has changed so much that the current mode of operation is

no longer tenable (Porter, 2008). The 1954 and 1955 desegregation decisions of Brown v.

Board of Education and Brown II legally established that a segregated education system could not be considered equal and higher education institutions found themselves significantly misaligned with their environments (Yosso, Parker, Solorzano, & Lynn,

2004). A short time later, the Civil Rights Movement called for a clear-cut change to a racially desegregated environment that higher education administrators were uninclined to yield (Horowitz, 1987). The movement inspired several executive orders for immediate desegregation and culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ensured

access to higher education for Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian American men

as well as white women (Jayakumar et al., 2018).

Higher education institutions were unprepared to welcome Black students onto

campus as equals with white students, though equality advocates were present in the

campus communities. The 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v.

Bakke set the precedent for seeking a diverse student body because “diversity contributes

to the type of critical thinking central to the mission and quality of higher education”

(Jayakumar et al., 2018, p. 25). To begin the process of equality, the admissions

subsystem was the first to comply with the new legal precedents by developing race-

conscious admissions policies (Jayakumar et al., 2018). This series of events inspired the

42 first institution-level initiatives for diversity, equity, and social justice on campuses, a strategic evolutionary leap from higher education institutions or they would not survive this environment.

In terms of worldview, the opening of college campuses for students of color in the mid-1960s also paved the way for increased diversity of religious, spiritual, and nonreligious perspectives (Cohen, 1998). Initially, most students of color likely ascribed to a

Christian faith, as only 9% of all incoming students were Black in 1970 but 82% of students identified as Christian (Eagan et al., 2016). With the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, the country opened to non-European and non-

Christian populations and increased the diversity of the nation racially, ethnically, and in terms of worldview (Stamm, 2003). The national and campus environments for worldview diversity were significantly changed as of 2015, when an incoming first-year class was likely to identify as 55% Christian, 26% non-religious, 16% well-known other faiths, and 2% with another worldview entirely (Mayhew, Rockenbach, Correia et al.,

2016). Additionally, over 80% of our students are coming to campus interested in exploring spirituality (Astin et al., 2006) and 85% of students expect their campuses to be welcoming to worldviews of all kinds (Rockenbach et al., 2017). Based on this literature and my own campus-based experiences, I perceive public higher education to be on the verge of an evolutionary shift centered on student worldview diversity.

Summary

This section outlined how public institutions serve as rich contexts for encounters across worldview diversity. First, I reviewed Eck’s (2001) concept of pluralism as an

interactive and iterative process that allows one to maintain their own worldview while

understanding another’s perspective. Second, I described the national and campus

contexts in terms of worldview diversity to show how pluralism is a needed skill-set of

college graduates, and one that will require some changes to develop at public

institutions. Third and finally, I reviewed the organizational nature of public higher

education institutions using key examples from higher education’s history. These

examples served a double purpose: first, highlighting how worldview diversity has been

connected to and disconnected from the undergirding goals of higher education, and

second, reinforcing the effectiveness of using public institutions as the context for

exploring student interactions across worldview diversity. The next section shifts focus from the national context and higher education institutions to an examination of how the campus worldview climate has developed over time.

A Complicated Relationship: Worldview on Campus

The unhappy state of affairs on most secular campuses… is that, although religious difference is an important piece of pluralism, it too often gets ignored, conveniently marginalized, or sugar-coated in higher education. Somehow, we feel we are on safe, more righteous, more politically acceptable ground when we are advocating the merits of racial, ethnic, class, sexual, and gender differences. (Nash, 2001, p. 5)

My upbringing was purposefully secular – at no point would I have labeled myself or my parents as Christians. When asked about religion, I would say that my mother grew up Lutheran and my father Catholic, but we had no specific religion. At the time, I had no idea so many people went to church on Sunday mornings that they scheduled basketball and softball games around the timeframe. The only regular Sunday morning commitment of my young life was a few years when my dad and I went bowling 44

each week to take advantage of a steep discount; in hindsight, I realized the discount was

related to Sunday church attendance. When I was young, I was effectively religion-blind and rarely ascribed structures or decisions to religious reasons. I remember beginning to understand my own Christian privilege as mildly shocking because that religious label seemed so distant from my family’s experience. My first realization was in college through trainings where I learned about my white privilege. During one of the exercises, we moved around the room based on whether the holidays we celebrated were national days off, the school calendar accommodated most family celebrations, or the holidays in movies were the ones my family celebrated. I was considerably more surprised by the

Christian privilege my family accessed, which I had never considered, than the various ways whiteness privileged us. I also had some productive cognitive dissonance recognizing that even though I had experienced a significant worldview change to a

Christian perspective, that experience had nothing to do with the Christian privilege I enjoyed.

The story of my family’s relationship with Christianity highlights the impact of

foundational ideology, the complications associated with taking on a new worldview, and the dissonance that often precedes development on one individual. Similarly, this section

describes the relationship between the college campus and matters of worldview throughout higher education’s history that have an impact on institutions’ worldview climates. As with many relationships, the connection between these two concepts has

changed over time. I believe the various iterations of this relationship are important to

explicate in order to make sense of student experiences across worldview difference on

public campuses. Therefore, this section first discusses how the origin story of higher

education has resulted in the presence of foundational Christian privilege at public

institutions and then reviews how the secularization movement of the late twentieth

century reinvented the campus worldview climate.

Foundational Christian Privilege

As previously reviewed, early higher education in the United States was linked to

the Christian identity, as most institutions were either founded by Christian organizations or for a predominantly Christian student body (Cohen, 1998). Initial college-goers were all men, mostly Protestant, mostly white, and if they were not affluent were likely studying to be ministers or teachers (Horowitz, 1987). For the next two hundred years these demographics remained largely the same though both the number of institutions and students grew substantially (Cohen, 1998). The first demographic shift occurred in the

1920s when significant numbers of women enrolled in college after World War I, though campuses largely remained white and Christian. As the Civil Rights Movement progressed through the 1960s, Black students were able to enroll in previously all-white

institutions, and college access for all underrepresented populations rose (Cohen, 1998).

When the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 was ratified, it opened the

country to non-European and non-Christian populations and increased the racial, ethnic,

and worldview diversity of campus populations (Stamm, 2003).

Privilege studies examine how holding advantaged social identities result in

unearned benefits that those with disadvantaged identities do not enjoy (Jones & Abes,

2013). Peggy McIntosh’s (1990) seminal work on white privilege focused the attention of

diversity advocates on the unseen, unconscious systems of oppression that keep those

with dominant identities in power. Though this early work only explored the privilege and power systems of race and gender, McIntosh (1990) was clear that “we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation” (p.

4). It has become common practice to include a discussion of privilege in any exploration

of social identities (Jones & Abes, 2013).

Schlosser (2003) extended McIntosh's work by exploring the various privileges associated with being Christian in the United States. He similarly conceptualized

Christian privilege as a nonconscious ideology as one explanation for how “implicit beliefs and attitudes are used to maintain the status quo” (p. 47). Using metaphor to make his point, he compared the pervasive existence of Christian privilege to water, saying that in the same way that a fish cannot understand his environment as wet, Christians cannot understand their environment as either oppressive to others or advantaging to them because it has always been that way.

Blumenfeld (2006) formalized this idea using McIntosh’s original metaphor, saying that Christian privilege can be understood as:

… a seemingly invisible, unearned, and largely unacknowledged array of benefits

accorded to Christians, with which they often unconsciously walk through life as

if effortlessly carrying a knapsack tossed over their shoulders. This system of

benefits confers dominance on Christians while subordinating members of other

faith communities as well as non-believers. These systemic inequities are

pervasive throughout the society. (p. 195)

Christians in this work were defined as those who believed in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and ascribed to the teachings of both the Old and New Testaments of the

Christian Bible (Schlosser, 2003).

In the United States, Christians have experienced unearned privileges manifesting as either cultural dominance or long-standing political and typically cause oppression of other worldview groups including religious minorities (e.g., Buddhists, Hindus,

Muslims), religious nones, and to some degree Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists who may otherwise consider themselves to hold Christian perspectives (Fairchild, 2009;

Blumenfeld, 2006; Schlosser, 2003). The history of Christian dominance in the United

States offers a clear picture of the origins of Christian privilege, but the nature of privilege makes it difficult for those who possess it to see it (Fairchild, 2009). Even the most common public debate about Christian privilege, the separation of church and state, rests on the idea that everyone knows what a church is and has a relationship with a church without concessions for the many citizens who hold a different or no religion

(Schlosser, 2003). Christian holidays are regularly celebrated using tax dollars, either through street decorations and tree lightings or the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White

House Lawn (Blumenfeld, 2006). Christmas, in particular, has been reframed as a secular celebration that everyone is able to be a part of no matter their religious identity, which erases the presence of Christian privilege from view while at the same time reinscribes

Christian celebrations as normative (Ferber, 2012). The pervasiveness of Christian

privilege has become so normative that many describe the United States as a Christian

nation despite clear evidence that the country’s founders never intended to establish a

religious state (Fairchild, 2009).

There are many ways the normative effect of Christian privilege is extensive on college campuses. Chapels are often a prominent architectural monument to the Christian history of an institution, and the academic calendars, dining options, and policies are organized around an assumed Christian majority (Seifert, 2007). While those with non- dominant worldviews have reported experiencing some measure of oppression on campus because of Christian privilege, some scholars have been exploring the experiences of

Christian students who have had “othering” experiences on campus that contrast with the concept of Christian privilege (Bowman & Small, 2010; Edwards, 2017; Moran et al.,

2007). Several of these studies have shown that students who ascribe to an active practice of their Evangelical Christian doctrine have reported feelings of marginalization on campus (Bowman & Small, 2010; Bryant, 2005; Moran et al., 2007), muddying the picture of how Christian privilege plays out in campus spaces. These studies point to the normative secular behaviors of the campus environment as partial explanation for these students’ experiences. In the next section, I review literature that explored how the college campus moved from foundationally Christian to operationally secular.

Secularization of the Public Campus

Scholars have documented a three-phase shift in the ideological grounding of U.S. higher education institutions from founding to the current era. Colleges with a classically

Protestant Christian worldview were often founded by churches working in conjunction

with the state (Marsden, 1992). Both the church and state considered these institutions

mechanisms of public service that educated citizens while looking after their religious

welfare through attendance requirements at either chapel or church services. Longfield

(1992) examined these realities at non-sectarian, public institutions in the Midwest and reported that they required Bible study, daily chapel, weekly church attendance, coursework in Christian thought, and prayer before each class, concluding that the

Protestant Christian “religion pervaded the lives of these institutions” (p. 49).

The second ideological phase began shortly after the Civil War ended, and by the end of the nineteenth century a liberal Protestantism entwined with ensuring national welfare had become the underlying worldview for most colleges and universities

(Longfield, 1992). Specific religious ties were being disestablished across the higher education industry as denominational oversight opposed new goals of detached scientific inquiry, professionalization of professors separate from clergy, and topical specialization

(Marsden, 1992). Starting with the Morrill Act of 1862 that established land-grant institutions, the industrialization of the nation drove the need for higher education to prominence with the money from government and industry as the need for a technically adept workforce emerged (Marsden, 1992). However, though teaching and research on- campus consistently moved in a secular direction, during this phase the religious commitments of faculty members and students remained actively Protestant off-campus

(Longfield, 1992).

The end of the first World War heralded the third phase, in which liberal

Protestants and post-Protestants (or secularists) found themselves in agreement that “the

scientific age had brought with it higher-level moral principles that could form the basis for a consensus of values that would benefit all humanity” (Marsden, 1992, p. 22).

Though these two groups operated from different foundations, they pursued the same mission of service to the nation through higher education by ensuring a democratic education, instilling a moral duty to fellow citizens, and encouraging the critical questioning of authority (Marsden, 1992). The second World War provided a proving ground for these high-level moral ideals, first by exemplifying what could happen without a commitment to them and second by providing the financial means for mass higher education through the G.I. Bill (Cohen, 1998). The vocational practicality of higher education to returning soldiers promoted a more secular worldview by pursuing education solely for economic reasons rather than moral ones, thus pushing lofty discussions of foundational ideology firmly to the periphery (Marsden, 1992).

At the same time, the study of religion and how it shaped moral character was rapidly gaining popularity and many institutions were creating research-focused religion departments. These new departments were often oriented toward non-Western, non- conventional, and non-Christian religions (Marsden, 1992). Additionally, the close of the twentieth century evidenced great diversity among students, faculty, and staff that moved secular thought away from a broadly Protestant grounding to a more pluralistic secularism that welcomed all beliefs but held none specifically – an ideal setting for the proliferation of academic disciplines and consumer-driven education (Marsden, 1992).

The next section reviews how this secular ideology has been operationalized on public campuses in the current era.

Operational secularism in practice. Marsden (1992) proposed that secularization was composed of ideological and methodological components. The ideological, reviewed above, is concerned with the underlying worldview of higher education institutions and generally moved from classically Protestant through liberal

Protestantism to a pluralistic secularism. The methodological component of secularization is important because it helps explain how this ideological evolution occurred with so little protest – did the more classically Protestant Christian members of these institutions not notice the drift? Marsden (1992) discusses that many of the champions of certain secular methods were Protestant because they saw science as a way to bolster and extend the reach of their Christian ideals rather than as a threat to them.

Following this line of thought, professionalization, specialization, and scientific inquiry were simply more technological ways of advancing the “Christian civilization both morally and materially” (Marsden, 1992, p. 17).

However, as secular ideals took hold, the Protestant Christian worldview fell from favor in higher education institutions as did the place of religion in the public life of a typical American (Hart, 1999). Hart (1999) discussed the “religious schizophrenia” (p.

237) at work which upholds the right to private beliefs but is skeptical that those beliefs should inform any sort of public action. Similarly, Marsden (1992) differentiated teaching religion from teaching about religion as an example of how institutions used methodological secularization to keep the idea of religion accessible to the academy but at the same time remove its influence.

At most institutions, the messy and convoluted nature of these arguments result in

the institution operating from a dominantly secular worldview. For example, academic

freedom protects the university and its scholars from the external restraints of

government and religion and allows for the establishment of professional standards free

of these influences (Hart, 1999). Freedom of expression allows for individuals to express

both political and religious viewpoints; however, in a university setting expressing

political or religious opinions could be seen as counter to upholding academic freedom.

In practice, often faculty or staff will choose to withhold their views while on campus from what they practice in the community to avoid any appearance of conflict (Hart,

1999). This type of worldview conversation is often dominant on college campuses but has historically ignored what students want or expect from the experience in favor of what the institution plans to provide. While this is one way to move through this circumstance, Marsden (1992) proposes that the same circumstances should require that

faculty reveal their worldviews so that students can take them into account.

Unfortunately, many faculty, administrators, and staff feel constrained by a specific legal

mandate: the separation of church and state. The next section more fully explores what

this term means and how it has impacted the worldview diversity climate on public

campuses.

Muddied Water: The Separation of Church and State

The United States’ commitment to separating the government from a specific

religion was established by founders “who believed that such a separation not only

protected the religions themselves but also sheltered individuals from the religious

tyranny they had witnessed in their own lifetimes” (Fairchild, 2009, p. 8). Thus, the

constitution prohibits the government from establishing a state religion and from

interfering with citizens as they practice their religions (Lugo et al., 2010). Catholic and

Baptist adherents were staunch advocates for codifying this separation because they had

been subject to significant discrimination by other Christian denominations while other

proponents recognized that immigration would continue to diversify the nation (Fairchild,

2009).

While the separation of church and state is often referred to it is not a well

understood concept. A survey of religious knowledge revealed that while most people

(89%) know that a teacher is not able to lead a class in prayer in the United States, only

23% know that a religious text can be used as an example of literature and only 36% know that classes comparing religions are allowed in public schools (Lugo et al., 2010).

What I find most interesting about these statistics is that the majority of people are clear on what they are not allowed to do, but very few understand what is allowable when religion intersects with public space.

Students, often using their college years to explore life’s big questions, feel the effects of the unclear path forward that accounts for both separation of church and state and the right to practice a given worldview without interference (Fairchild, 2009). As outlined above, the worldview climate on public campuses is often set subtly against religious practice in favor of secularism and subtly for Christian practice versus other

worldview expressions. An instructive example from the literature is that two-thirds of college students report that professors do not encourage discussion of spiritual or

religious matters in class despite a majority of faculty expressing that developing a

meaningful philosophy in life is very important or essential as a life goal (Astin et al.,

2006). This conflict among and within faculty members about how to handle worldview

conversations in their classes results in almost half of student reporting dissatisfaction

with how their university environment has provided opportunities to reflect on religious

or spiritual matters (Astin et al., 2006).

The institutionalization of the separation of church and state has also affected the worldview climate. For example, the policies guiding faculty on providing “religious accommodations” for their students to participate in worldview celebrations that fall outside the standard academic calendar (Seifert, 2007). While the policy ensures students are free to practice their various worldviews, it also highlights the foundationally

Christian academic calendar. Students holding non-dominant worldview identities find it difficult to explain their needs to faculty members and encounter difficulty getting their class absences excused (Seifert, 2007). This could be exacerbated when the worldview practice is significantly different from the normative behavior (e.g., Jewish or Native

American whose rituals involve a week of mourning). Similarly, students rely on their institutions to provide appropriate spaces for worldview practice. Most campuses have spaces either originally built or easily used for Christian religious practice but the current legal precedents guiding the separation of church and state do not allow these institutions to designate space for exclusive use of a worldview group (Clark & Brimhall-Vargas,

2003). The common work-around of creating an interfaith or multifaith prayer room to

accommodate many worldview practices complies with the legal precedent but does not

address the practical difficulties of all non-Christian groups effectively sharing one space.

Student affairs divisions often provide a natural co-curricular home for

worldview-related activities through student clubs and departments of spiritual life.

Helping students navigate the worldview climate on campus often falls to these front-line

staff members, who assist students with officially registering their worldview

organizations, gaining access to program funding, reserving space for meetings, planning

campus holiday celebrations, and connecting with community resources (Stamm, 2003).

The easy association is enduring, as the American Council on Education (1937) included

in the Student Personnel Point of View that universities should assist students “through

progression in religious, emotional, social development, and other non-academic personal

and group relationships” (p. 3). Unfortunately, attending to the “spirit” of the student fell

away as the academy secularized and attempted to fully separate church from state.

Rationality, empiricism, and intellectual inquiry – not an exploration of “inner life”

(Nash, 2001) – became the hallmarks of an academic experience (Stewart et al., 2011).

While student affairs professionals have expressed the need to incorporate worldview diversity into multiculturally sound practice in the same way the work has advanced around race, gender, and sexual orientation (Stewart et al., 2011), the muddied waters of the separation of church and state do not offer a clear path forward for advancing worldview diversity work on public campuses.

Summary

The worldview climate on public campuses is a complex mix of foundational

Christian privilege and operational secular norms that often goes unexamined due to real

and perceived constraints placed by the separation of church and state. Christian privilege

manifests through the most basic structures of public campuses, such as the academic

calendar and assumed requirements for worldview practice. The secularization of higher

education overlaid the foundational Christian privilege with vaguely anti-religious

operational norms. The campus worldview climate on public campuses is shaped by this

history while being informed and constrained by perceptions and interpretations of the

separation of church and state. Overall, the campus worldview environment on public

campuses remains muddy and often contradictory. However, students continue to

navigate these environments and explore their worldviews during their college years. In

the next section, I examine what we already know about students’ worldview-related

campus experiences.

Students and the Campus Worldview Environment

The current challenge we face is that many colleges and universities do not provide an environment that is conducive to the open exchange and expression of pluralistic religious and spiritual views, despite valuable outcomes associated with an inclusive climate. (Rockenbach, Mayhew, Morin, Crandall, & Selznick, 2015, p. 53)

My own first-year expectations of the worldview environment at the large, public

institution I attended was that it would be open enough to accept me as I was, help me

understand other ways of being, and support me through any change of my own ideology.

While I felt that the university as a whole was fairly open and welcoming, I remember 57

being frustrated with the professionals I interacted with on campus – those associated with the university would not engage with me about my personal worldview journey and those associated with various Christian ministries seemed uninterested in helping me

understand how to reconcile the many non-Christian realities of the college campus. At

first, I thought I was failing to seek the correct resources – surely someone on campus

could provide some guidance! But as my college experience progressed, I found that even

the facilitators of student affairs training sessions designed to explore the salience of

social identities were rarely able to provide challenge or offer support when asked

worldview-related questions. I regularly perceived a sense of required avoidance from

staff members when it came to the topics of faith, religion, and spirituality. Luckily,

many of my peers were happy to explore and help make sense of how these topics

affected our daily lives over dinner, sitting in hallways, at campus events, and during

smoke breaks. I quickly determined that these informal interactions were more helpful for

me than formal spaces but recognized that was not the same experience for all students.

This section reviews what we know about how students have experienced worldview diversity within higher education contexts according to the extant literature.

First, I review research related to the climate for worldview diversity on campus. Second,

I explore what we know about students who are more public with their worldview expressions. Finally, I describe recent studies that explore the interfaith engagement and pluralism on campus. I conclude with a summary of how we have approached worldview-related research in higher education and opportunities for furthering this line

of inquiry.

The Campus Climate for Worldview Diversity

The now-ingrained discourse of college campuses as “secular only” spaces have

made discussing faith, spirituality, and worldview difficult despite significant interest

from students in exploring these questions during their college careers (Rockenbach &

Mayhew, 2014). Astin et al. (2010) outlined a decade of research exploring how students

make meaning of and engage with spirituality on campus. They concluded that students

experience growth along several dimensions including the search for meaning and

purpose, feeling peaceful and centered through hardship, relating compassionately to

others, and being open to others of different faiths and life philosophies. In this study,

students who showed growth in peacefulness or centeredness experienced positive effects

on their GPA, leadership skills, well-being, ability to get along with different others, and

satisfaction with college (Astin et al., 2010).

Students’ perception of their campus as a welcoming place and their satisfaction with the campus climate have been linked to a variety of student outcomes, including: college adjustment, sense of belonging, well-being, and persistence and completion

(Rockenbach and Mayhew, 2014). Climate research has historically concentrated on the experiences and satisfaction of underrepresented groups on U.S. campuses, as scholars attempted to understand how their satisfaction levels influenced desired outcomes like retention, graduation, sense of belonging, and eventually career placement. Expanding this work to explore the campus climate as perceived by all students, not only underrepresented groups, Rockenbach and Mayhew (2014) created a model for examining the worldview climate of an institution. They conceptualized student

satisfaction with the campus worldview climate as a function of four factors: student

characteristics (including worldview identification), structural worldview diversity

(representation of different worldviews), the psychological climate (including support,

space, spiritual expression, divisiveness, microaggressions, and coercion), and the

behavioral climate (encountering the other, challenging curricular and cocurricular

engagement, provocative experiences; Rockenbach & Mayhew, 2014).

Typically, students’ positive evaluations of a worldview climate include their exposure to diverse worldviews, their ability to be authentic to their worldview, their ability to find support for their worldview practice, the opportunity for challenge in encounters with others of diverse worldviews, and a lack of tension and conflict based on worldview on campus (Rockenbach & Mayhew, 2014). Practices such as interfaith dialogue, framing activities as inclusive of all faith traditions and life philosophies, establishing partnerships with community partners who ascribe to various faiths and philosophies, and training student affairs staff to engage with religious and nonreligious perspectives have been advanced as ways to create space on campus for spiritual and worldview development (Patel & Geiss, 2016; Rockenbach & Mayhew, 2014; Stewart et al., 2011). While some of these practices are gaining traction on college campuses despite the secularization of these spaces, a key question remains about whom interfaith spaces serve and what worldviews are welcomed on campus.

While the ideology and methodology of higher education institutions has shifted over time from a firmly Protestant Christian grounding to pluralistic secularism, students enrolled at colleges and universities have consistently represented the broadest spectrum

60 of religious diversity present in the United States (Eck, 2001). Among undergraduate students, Christians are still the dominant religious group on U.S. campuses but have declined from 74.5% to 61.38% between 2005 and 2015 while students identifying as

Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, or another religion have increased representation during the same period (Eagan et al., 2016). Atheist, Agnostic, or religiously “none” students are the fastest growing group and comprise about one-third of all traditional undergraduates

(Eagan et al., 2016). Attendance of religious services by students has also decreased from about 78% who said they attend frequently or occasionally in 2005 to 69% in 2015

(Downey, 2017).

Some recent studies have explored the campus environment from the perspective of students with non-dominant worldviews, or worldview minority students. Additionally, scholars have explored the experiences of Christian, or worldview majority, students who have reported marginalization (or “othering”) on campus despite the presence of

Christian privilege. The next section will review the findings of these studies to provide a picture of how religious students are being impacted by worldview diversity in light of

Christian privilege and the norms of secular thought on campus.

Practicing worldview minority students. Surprisingly, few studies exist that explore the experiences of worldview minority students, likely because the racial, ethnic, cultural, or national origin status dimensions of their identities are perceived as the more primary identity. Cole and Ahmadi (2003) interviewed seven Muslim women who veiled to understand their experience, their decision to veil, their perceptions of the college environment, and how they believe their college experience has been impacted by their

decision. Their study revealed that peer interactions surrounding their choice to veil had

the most influence on these students’ perception of acceptance or alienation (Cole &

Ahmadi, 2003). Interestingly, alienation was perceived to be the outcome “when religion,

not the shawl of a cultural ensemble, [was] perceived as the reason for veiling” and

subsequent interactions were guided by fear and suspicion (Cole & Ahmadi, 2003, p. 57).

Mayhew (2004) took a phenomenological approach to define “spirituality” by exploring

the experiences of eight students of eight different worldviews at two public institutions.

While not specifically explicating the experiences of religious minority students, six of

these eight students held non-dominant worldviews and the work revealed consensus on

the nature of spirituality across worldviews. Namely, spirituality is what helps “human

beings make sense of their nature and purpose… in connection to and with the external world” (Mayhew, 2004, p. 666). While this study did not examine the student

experiences in terms of diverse encounters, many of the participants described their own

views of spirituality in contrast to other views, showing a recognition of difference

between worldviews.

Following these two qualitative studies, Bryant (2005) engaged in a quantitative

analysis of how students holding non-majority worldviews present demographically,

associate their religion with their parents, practice their religion, align on political and

social issues, characterize their group in terms of religious questions, and struggle with

spiritual questions. The study provided an empirically-derived description of students

adhering to Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Unitarian Universalism belief

systems, groups about which very little is known. Examples of the findings include: daily

prayer is most practiced by Muslim (85%) and Buddhist (79%) students; religious

minority students typically do not identify politically as conservative or far right;

Unitarian Universalists are the most likely (64%) to stress the value of a meaningful life

philosophy; and no more than 14% of students of any religion strongly agreed that the

universe arose by chance. Based on this work, Bryant (2005) concluded that the

“worldviews students bring with them to college serve as the lenses they use to make

sense of their encounters within the classroom and beyond it” (p. 24) and called for

further study.

More recently, Cole and Ahmadi (2010) revisited the Muslim student experience

with a quantitative study designed to determine whether Muslim, Christian, and Jewish

students perceive 15 specific college experiences differently based on worldview. The

authors found that there were no statistical differences between these groups in a number

of ways (e.g., hours spent studying, time discussing politics) but were most surprised by this finding in terms of support received from faculty and average college grades (p. 131).

Based on the literature, these two areas often vary across other types of diverse identities.

In terms of differences, Muslim students spent more time attending identity awareness

workshops, encountering diversity in their roommates and social circles, and participating

in an organization representing their race or ethnicity. The next section discusses the

experiences of practicing worldview majority students.

Practicing worldview majority students. While the literature specifically

exploring the experiences of minority worldview students is small, the body of research

on the Christian student is newer but quickly growing within higher education. Until the

turn of the century, most research about campus people groups focused on those who

were historically oppressed and their experiences on campus. As the century closed,

McIntosh (1990) introduced the idea of dominant identity privilege by examining how

her own status as a white person gave her unearned and unfair advantage in everyday life.

Her work opened the door for examining dominant identities and the structures that

support their continued dominance to dismantle systems of oppression. Initial inquiry,

however, was focused on the experiences of non-Christian students, with the idea that all

research to that point had been based on Christian students and would not substantively

add to the literature (Blumenfeld, 2006). It has only been within the last decade that a

body of work reflecting what we know about evangelical Christian students has taken

shape.

Hammond and Hunter (1984) were among the first to examine how Christian students maintained their worldviews in an increasingly secular world. They used the word “evangelical” to encompass Protestant viewpoints that were conservative, fundamentalist, or orthodox, and created an Index of Evangelical Beliefs as part of their work to measure how evangelical a given student presented. They surveyed college students on ten campuses and found that those on public, secular campuses were less likely to be evangelical but, if they were, they were much more likely to develop a strong and active religious life during college. Conversely, students who went to environments more isolated from secularism, namely Christian colleges, were likely to identify as evangelicals but then experience a slow erosion of their beliefs over time. The authors concluded that the challenge provided to the evangelical students’ minds around their

faith – having to know their doctrine and regularly speaking to non-evangelicals – did

more to solidify their faith than being surrounded by students who generally held the same beliefs. Interestingly, the authors’ tone in this article is first surprised that evangelicalism is not only persevering but thriving on campus, and then quickly lauds the

rise of secularization despite the efforts of evangelicals to stop it.

Although evangelical Christians in the U.S. are certainly recipients of Christian privilege through their affiliation with the dominant religion, they are also considered to be somewhat outside the mainstream ideology (Bowman & Small, 2010). Evangelical students on campus report othering experiences based on assumptions of secular thought and behavior made by faculty and staff, denigration of religion generally and Christianity in particular, stereotyping perpetrated by faculty, staff, and students, exclusion by other students based on their religiously-based social conduct, and difficulty getting space and funding for activities hosted by their religiously-based student group (Bowman & Small,

2010; Bryant, 2011; Moran et al., 2007). Evangelical students reported the classroom environment as particularly negative as professors often assumed that all students engaged in drinking and partying, deconstructed various Christian academic stances, and

mentioned Christianity disrespectfully as compared to involvement with an Eastern or

Tribal religion (Bryant, 2011; Moran et al., 2007). Some students reported using the

technique of “passing,” most often as a more secularized version of themselves, as one

frequently employed in classroom and social settings to avoid conflict or making others

feel guilty about their actions.

This body of literature highlights the othering experiences of actively practicing

Christian students while warning that failure to help students acknowledge and unpack

Christian privilege “may forestall or foreclose Christian students’ critical examination of themselves and their own traditions while simultaneously stifling non-Christian students’

expression of their spiritual identity” (Seifert, 2007, p. 11). Unfortunately, while the

concepts of white and male privilege seem to be points of engagement for students,

faculty, and staff to discuss oppressive practices, neither Christian privilege nor othering

are often discussed even in intentional, worldview-focused dialogue settings (Edwards,

2017).

Student perceptions of the campus worldview climate depend on several related

factors. First, exposure to diverse worldviews is important but even more effective if

these encounters challenge the student to think more deeply about their own held beliefs

in a supportive environment. Second, opportunities to develop and authentically practice

their own held worldviews matter to students, and these opportunities can be limited on

the college campus for both worldview minority and majority students. Third, students

notice tension and conflict based on worldview even if it is not directed at their

worldview identity, and an environment free of such tensions is generally perceived more

positively. This section has reviewed the literature about student perceptions of the

campus worldview climate broadly and by those who participate in more active

worldview practices. In the next section, I turn from what we know about student

perceptions of the worldview climate to review how students are connecting across

worldviews.

Student Connections Across Worldviews

Recent research has shown that college students want their higher education

institutions to be environments welcoming of diverse religious, spiritual, and non-

religious perspectives – or worldviews – and provide space for their own exploration and

development of a personal philosophy (Astin et al., 2006; Rockenbach et al., 2017).

Before college, students are exposed to worldview differences via news, social media,

entertainment, and other forums and arrive on college campuses ready to personally

connect across these differences (Astin et al., 2005; Mayhew, Rockenbach, Correia et al.,

2016). They recognize that the national composition of worldview diversity continues to

change and are seeking opportunities to encountering other belief systems as an

unavoidable and quintessentially American experience (Eck, 2001). This section will

review the philosophical argument for promoting student connections across worldviews,

the beginnings of a research agenda focused on cross-worldview interactions, and the

impact of these interactions on students.

Philosophy of cross-worldview connections. Colleges and universities have long

been the mechanism for students to determine and internalize their values and beliefs

(Chickering et al., 2006; Horowitz, 1988). For the first few centuries of higher education

in America, the Christian religion either overtly or covertly provided a context for almost all discussion, activity, moral and ethical training, and campus community (Marsden &

Longfield, 1992). While the increased diversity of campus environments and changing nature of the university’s relationship to its students required that the dominant Christian

perspectives be challenged, educators and institutions took a more dramatic approach and

67 quietly removed religion from students’ public life on campus to their private lives elsewhere (Hart, 1999). As secular Christianity becomes ever more culturally embedded

(Blumenfeld, 2006), the nation’s founding principle that religious identity should be free of the state’s control stands firm. “Freedom of religion is also freedom from religion of any sort” (Eck, 2001, p. 41), and in most cases the ties to religion were broken along with any sense of spirituality and development of the “inner life” in collegiate culture

(Chickering et al., 2006).

Nash (2001) argues that this break caused the exploration of values to be torn from the fabric of higher education; in striving to avoid the topic of religion entirely and failing to recognize that students’ values have been shaped by their spiritual, religious, or moral stances, educators resigned their platform for helping students make meaning of these views. While true that the potential religious identifiers of today are many and varied – “people refer to the values and commitments that shape their lives as religion, spirituality, humanism, secularism, or agnosticism” (Jacobsen & Jacobsen, 2012, para. 4)

– the sociological and psychological role of religion has remained the same. Astin et al.

(2011) used the term spirituality to describe this broader role separate from a specific set of faith practices:

…spirituality has to do with the values that we hold most dear, our sense of who

we are and where we come from, our beliefs about why we are here – the

meaning and purpose that we see in our work and our life – and our sense of

connectedness to one another and to the world around us. (p. 4)

Scholars argue that an important part of this process is for all students to decide

what they believe, how their beliefs informs their values, and how they practice their belief within society (Astin et al., 2011; Chickering et al., 2006; Nash, 2001). Educators increasingly agree that there is an imperative need for campus programming designed to develop students’ ability to establish themselves in a diverse and globalized world

(Jorgenson & Shultz, 2012). Yet a disconnect persists between how higher education institutions are providing resources to engage students across worldviews and respond to their quests for religious, spiritual, and non-religious knowledge (Astin et al., 2011;

Rockenbach et al., 2018; Stewart et al., 2011).

Beginnings of a worldview research agenda. Robert Nash (2001) was the author of the seminal work Religious Pluralism in the Academy, which shares his experiences as a professor and participant in conversations across worldview differences with students.

He used his role to create a class devoted to helping students engage in conversations that included religious, spiritual, and non-religious perspectives. Despite his colleagues’ expectations to the contrary, Nash (2001) reported that class met and exceeded enrollment every semester for multiple years. From his own observations of the academy and these class room conversations, he outlined why higher education institutions should be interested in students’ meaning making. His rationale included the worldview narratives of several students to showcase the need to increase pluralism orientation among students and used his own religion and values capstone as an exemplar of how moral conversations and cross-worldview encounters could have this impact.

Sandy and Helen Astin motivated the resources of the Higher Education Research

Institute (HERI) to explore college students’ expectations and behaviors related to

spirituality, religion, and meaning making on campus (Astin, Astin, & Lindholm, 2004).

In 2003, they began the “Spirituality in Higher Education” study, the first longitudinally-

designed research of college student spirituality ever to be undertaken. For the first

component, they added 160 questions related to spirituality to a national first-year survey

that garnered over 100,000 student responses in the fall of 2004. Their goal was to

attempt to identify trends and patterns marking their religiousness and spirituality – how students were developing internally in terms of “values and beliefs, emotional maturity, spirituality, and self-understanding” (Astin et al., 2004, p. ii). The results of the first phase showed that around 80% of incoming students believed in the sacredness of live, had an interest in spirituality, attended religious services, and discussed religion with their friends (Astin et al., 2004, p. 5).

A portion of the same participants were invited to complete the second phase of the study, which garnered a total of just over 14,000 responses (Astin et al., 2011). Key findings from the longitudinal design included: 1) students do exhibit significant spiritual growth during college; 2) faculty are unlikely to engage students in spiritual or religious questions but when they do it encourages spiritual quest; 3) community service and exposure to diversity encourage spiritual growth; and, 4) growth in certain spiritual qualities enhances academic achievement and personal development (HERI, 2011). This study confirmed that “providing students with more opportunities to touch base with their

‘inner selves’ will facilitate growth in their academic and leadership skills, contribute to

70 their intellectual self-esteem and psychological well-being, and enhance their satisfaction with the college experience” (Astin et al., 2011, p. 157).

Shortly after the phase one results of the HERI study were published, Chickering,

Dalton, and Stamm (2006) authored Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher

Education to serve as handbook for faculty, staff, and administrators who were interested in creating space on campus for students to make meaning of their worldviews in order to graduate technically ready, affectively complex, and socially conscious citizens

(Chickering et al., 2006). They proposed four contexts in which increased authenticity and spirituality would be of benefit: the deteriorating global and national human condition; the rising costs of higher education due to its loss of status as a publicly supported industry; students’ need to engage issues of spirituality, purpose, and meaning during college; and, the reclamation of the “professional soul” needed to meet the current challenges within higher education (Chickering et al., 2006).

The findings from Spirituality in Higher Education study and the recommendations from Chickering, Dalton, and Stamm (2006) highlighted that students expected their higher education environments to contribute to their personal growth and provide space for support and expression of their meaning making process (Chickering et al., 2006). To further explore the HERI data, twelve authors were invited to explore the longitudinal data set with a specific research question related to the spiritual lives of college students (Bryant Rockenbach & Mayhew, 2013). The studies were grouped according to Astin’s Input-Environment-Output model, which created a frame for thinking about the exploration of spirituality on campus in terms of students, college

contexts, and outcomes (Bryant Rockenbach & Mayhew, 2013). Based on

recommendations emerging from this body of work, subsequent research efforts focused

on the impact of worldview diversity and cross-worldview interactions, or interfaith

engagement, on the student experience.

Impact of interfaith engagement. Mayhew et al. (2014) explored students’

perceptions of their campus worldview climates through a cross-sectional study and

found that commitment to a particular worldview is associated with negative perceptions

of the campus environment among worldview majority (i.e. Christian) students. The

authors suggest that the process of engaging in critical reflection about worldview, or

examining what has thus far been unexamined, may cause dissonance whether the

questioning is directly related to their worldview or not. In a related study, Mayhew,

Rockenbach, & Bowman (2016) studied how students of one worldview appreciated those from another worldview. They found that agnostic, atheist, Buddhist, Muslim,

Jewish, nonreligious, or secular humanist were unlikely to appreciate evangelical

Christian students, though their Christian peers were more likely to appreciate them.

The Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Survey (IDEALS) used a longitudinal mixed-methods study design to explore student development outcomes

related to worldview diversity and interfaith engagement across the college experience.

These outcomes built on the philosophical foundations reviewed above and included

students’ pluralism orientation, commitment to their own worldviews, and perceptions of

the campus climate in relation to worldview diversity ("About IDEALS," 2017). The

IDEALS research team published a report entitled Navigating Pluralism (Rockenbach et

al., 2017) to share the findings. Consistent with the scholarship reviewed in this section, results from the study showed that 85% of students expect their campuses to be a welcoming environment for diverse worldviews. Nuancing previous research, this study showed that students do not feel their campuses are equally welcoming of all worldviews.

They perceived that Atheists (82%), Evangelical Christians (79%), Jews (78%),

Buddhists (73%), Hindus (73%), Muslims (70%), and Latter-Day Saints (69%) would feel less welcome than students not holding those worldviews. Though abstracted, these numbers highlight students’ perception that the worldview you hold will affect how you experience the campus climate.

IDEALS student participants reported numerous and varied negative experiences due to the campus worldview climates on their campuses. Overt tensions tended to be rare, such as a noticeable sense of division (17%) or public quarreling (19%). More commonly reported tensions were in-grouping, where students interacted primarily with those holding similar worldviews to their own (53%), or compartmentalizing, where students separated their academic experience from their personal worldviews (55%).

Students pointed to their peers as most likely to be insensitive or inconsiderate about their worldviews (79%). Alarmingly, students also reported that just under half of faculty

(49%) and staff or administrators (41%) were perceived to demonstrate these same

insensitivities. Cross-worldview discrimination was also part of these participants’

experiences, with just under a quarter of all students reporting that their sexual

orientation, race or ethnicity, gender identity, or personal worldview prompted a negative worldview interaction. These results illuminate that students are in situations with other

students, faculty, and staff where worldview is a salient component of how they are experiencing campus.

Students arrive on campus strongly committed to pluralism and maintain that commitment through their first year. In terms of personal connections across worldview differences, formal interfaith engagement drops significantly in both curricular and co-

curricular spaces. Over 10% fewer IDEALS participants reported that they discussed

religious or spiritual topics with their teachers or in the classroom setting, worked with

students of other worldviews on projects, and attended religious services of other traditions. Informal interfaith engagement results were mixed. Across the first year of college, students increased how often they studied with those of other worldviews, maintained how often they socialize in diverse worldview groups, and declined in the

frequency of meal sharing and conversations about commonly held values. These trends show that student interfaith engagement is happening regularly but primarily informally across students' first year of college.

Corporately, the results of the IDEALS study show that, 1) students’ worldviews affect how they perceive the campus climate, 2) frequently encounter situations on campus where worldview is a salient component, and 3) regularly engage across worldviews in informal spaces. An affective component of the IDEALS study examined how students appreciate those of other worldviews, their personal worldview commitments, and their pluralism orientations. Across the first year, students’ appreciative attitudes increased towards students holding Muslim, Atheist, Latter Day

Saints, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, and Evangelical worldviews. Echoing the behavioral

statistics outlined above, the study reported that the most statistically influential factors

for these gains were the perception of a welcoming campus climate, close relationships

with people of other worldviews, provocative encounters with diverse peers, finding

space on campus for support and spiritual expression, and increased knowledge of

positive aspects of other worldviews (Rockenbach et al., 2017, p. 12). IDEALS data also revealed that students who participated in formal or informal interfaith discussions were challenged with new information about an unfamiliar worldview, and even those who had

“unsettling” encounters with others about their own worldview resulted in a more thoughtfully committed worldview (Rockenbach et al., 2018, p. 10). Pluralism orientation also deepens during the first year through a variety of interfaith engagement activities such as conversations about religious or spiritual topics with faculty, casual social actions with others holding different worldviews, and brainstorming about how to solve large-

scale societal issues (Rockenbach et al., 2018). Clearly, students are making sense of

their encounters across worldviews throughout the campus environment in ways that

demonstrate arguably positive outcomes after the first year of college. In the next section,

I summarize this body of reviewed literature and share how it informed the selection of

the conceptual framework for this study.

Summary

The campus worldview climate was conceptualized by Rockenbach and Mayhew

(2014) as a function of student worldview identification (i.e. student characteristics), the

representation of different worldviews on campus (i.e. structural worldview diversity),

the support or lack of support for worldview expression (i.e. psychological climate), and

encountering others holding different worldviews (i.e. behavioral climate). As the

previous two sections covered in depth the potential worldview identification of students

and the likelihood of wide representation on campus, I looked more closely at literature

examining the psychological and behavioral climates. I was surprised by the lack of

research about the experiences of religious students in higher education. Very few studies

focused on the experiences of non-dominant worldview identities, and though a slightly larger body of work highlighted the difficult or othering experiences of Christian students on campus, it concurrently attempted to integrate these experiences into the broader picture of Christian privilege (Bryant, 2011; Bowman & Small, 2010; Moran et al.,

2007). By comparison, the literature exploring students’ connections across worldviews is significant and still emerging through the IDEALS study. We know from this body of literature that interfaith interactions affect student perceptions of the campus worldview climate and impact many other desirable outcomes of the undergraduate experience.

Summary of Reviewed Literature

What kind of faith refuses to be tested by real encounter with others? What kind of faith grows by speaking and proclaiming without having to listen, and perhaps be challenged, by the voices of others? (Eck, 1993a, p. 193)

Seeking to understand how people holding different worldviews were experiencing college has threaded through my higher education experiences. Initially, I thought the answers would be revealed in books, that if I worked to understand the tenets of this religion or the philosophy of this ethical stance then I would understand the people who ascribed to those belief systems. My own worldview was the first to be scrutinized when I engaged in a cross-worldview encounter, so I found myself seeking more

knowledge about my own beliefs. Also, I found that making sense of new ideologies

jumbled all my knowledge together so that what I learned recently, what I learned

growing up, and what I heard on the news this morning affected my encounter in the

same moment. At times, I acutely recognized how the environment could affect interfaith

interactions with support, discouragement, or apathy.

As I engaged in the literature presented in this section, I sought to understand how

public higher education institutions serve as contexts for encounters with worldview

diversity. I found that they not only reflect the national worldview landscape but magnify its diverse composition, so that public campuses are some of the most worldview diverse.

Additionally, I learned that public institutions are complex organizations that adapt as their environments change, respond when environmental feedback is high, and evolve when they no longer work. The history of worldview on college campuses offered instructive examples of how the national environment caused responses from higher education institutions.

I noted that the structural constraints of public higher education seemed unlikely to have kept the worldview status quo across hundreds of years. Accordingly, I explored how the current relationship between worldview and the campus environment developed over time. I discovered that most campuses were designed for people who ascribed to a

Protestant Christian worldview, so there is an embedded discourse that manifests primarily through the effects of Christian privilege. However, I also learned how the secularization movement within higher education removed worldview exploration from the student experience and made it a primarily academic exercise. Not only did this

remove many ways students developed their values and explored their own belief

systems, but it also created a set of secular operational norms on college campuses. In

public higher education, these were reinforced by the outworking of the legal mandate to

separate church from state.

In light of this contextual knowledge, I wanted to understand how scholars had

been exploring student expectations of and experiences in the campus worldview

environment. Several research studies explored how students perceived their campus

worldview climates, a next step in a significant body of inquiry looking at the effects of campus climate on student experiences. Overall, these studies showed that the worldview climate did affect both the in-college experience and long-term outcomes. Through qualitative research, scholars found that both worldview minority and majority students experienced challenges due to the worldview climates on their campuses. Over the last twenty years, several higher education scholars have called for a re-balancing of the college experience to include affective development, such as worldview exploration, along with the technical development that currently forms the basis of the curriculum.

Turning to cross-worldview interactions, the research revealed that students want to experience interfaith interactions and expect their campuses to be extremely welcoming to people of different worldviews. A growing body of research shows that students who have explored their “inner selves” (Astin et al., 2011, p. 157) are more likely to be satisfied with their college experience, exhibit a greater sense of well-being, and perform better academically and as leaders. Studies with rigorous, longitudinal designs have shown connections between worldview development and traditional student outcomes

(e.g., academic achievement, leadership, well-being) and newer outcomes such as global citizenship, appreciative attitudes, personal worldview commitment, and pluralism orientation.

My own worldview experiences, from undergraduate to student affairs professional and finally to researcher, helped me recognize that understanding the process of students encountering worldview difference constitutes a gap in the literature. As a student, there were many times an interfaith encounter was unexpected and I had to

quickly recognize our differences, pull my own knowledge together, and navigate

through the interaction. Intentional opportunities like programs or trainings still required

me to evaluate the context, my own worldview, the worldviews of others, and the goals

of the event in quick succession. The literature showed that several scholars have linked

encounters across diverse worldviews to desirable higher education outcomes. However,

no studies have examined the in-the-moment experience of students making sense of these inevitable encounters across worldview diversity on campus. In the next section, I describe critical sensemaking as a conceptual framework to explore how students are making sense of their encounters with worldview diversity.

Conceptual Framework: Critical Sensemaking

CSM… is an attempt to capture the individual sensemaker in context. (Aromaa et al., 2018, p. 17)

A specific moment of worldview-related sensemaking in my own college experience has maintained its clarity over time. I was meeting with my residence hall

director about one of the resident assistants during my first semester. I had discovered

that this student was in a very controlling, Christian-affiliated organization. I remember

him as a very nice guy, and he had invited me and many others to events held by this

group in a collegial, unpressured way. I had also heard that he had been the recipient of

hate mail, vandalism, and mean pranks due to his worldview and involvement with this

group. I was sitting in the office because I had gone to one of those events, experienced

some of the controlling aspects of the group, and was concerned about him, the potential

for other students to respond to these same invitations, and was still reeling from the

experience. My residence hall director listened politely to my concerns, kindly pointed

out that the student could legally associate with anyone on campus without affecting his

job, and then asked if I needed any recommendations for campus resources. I remember

sitting there, staring a bit past her head, trying to make sense of why this interaction was

awkward, unhelpful, and much less personal than I expected.

After continued reflection, I concluded that interactions about worldview are

often perceived as "landmines" ideally avoided on public campuses. I believe she was

worried about this student as well but could not tell him to stop associating with the

group. I was in the midst of a massive worldview exploration and wanted to talk about it,

but she felt constrained by the perceived scope of her work on campus. I felt like separation of church and state should give the campus agency, but my impression was

separation of church and state restricted the campus in this instance. More broadly, no

one wanted to officially discuss or give advice about anything related to worldview –

there were too many ways for the conversation to go wrong. I left her office trying to

make sense of all these perspectives, perceived in just a few minutes, to figure out how to

80 move forward as a student on campus and resident of the building. This story highlights that encounters with worldview diversity on public campuses are complicated and examination of them requires robust theories that frame the impact of both actions and contexts.

This section reviews critical sensemaking and how I used it as a conceptual framework for understanding how students make sense of their encounters across worldview difference. Critical sensemaking (CSM) was introduced as an extension of the organizational theory of Weickian sensemaking and was designed to understand how members of a specific organization make sense of change contextualized by the formative, structural, and discursive history of the organization (Helms Mills et al.,

2010). The tenets of the theory are shared first, then I share several studies that applied

Weickian sensemaking to higher education contexts, review how CSM has been applied to the study of participant sensemaking, and conclude with some thoughts about why

CSM is an appropriate framework to explore questions related to student sensemaking of worldview diversity.

Critical Sensemaking (CSM)

CSM was ideal for examining individual agency within an organizational context

(Aromaa et al., 2018). An extension of Weick’s (1995) organizational sensemaking, this theory has maintained the original properties of identity construction, retrospection, creative enactment, social, constant and ongoing, extracted cues, and plausibility while incorporating components that better frame it as a “complex process that occurs within, and is influenced by, a broader social environment” (Helms Mills et al., 2010, p. 188).

The dual foci of decision-making and context served to illuminate student encounters

with worldview diversity in the complicated context of public higher education. The

framework helped guide inquiry about the individual sensemaking of students about

worldview diversity on the public campus. The evolution of CSM is conveyed

chronologically in this section starting with Weick’s (1995) seven tenets of sensemaking.

Then the key epistemological changes from Weickian sensemaking to CSM are reviewed

followed by an overview of the macro-context addition to the original seven tenets.

Weickian sensemaking. Weick (1995) introduced the concept of organizational sensemaking as a framework for how organizations respond to disruptive circumstances in their environments that require members to change their behaviors and resume operations. He proposed that the process of sensemaking begins as members first work to describe how they are perceiving their current state and then how to proceed in response to what they identify as different (Weick et al., 2005). His work focused on the technology of language that captures the “the realities of agency, flow, equivocality, transience, reaccomplishment, unfolding, and emergence” (Weick et al., 2005, p. 410)

that are happening as organizational members put words to their perceptions, and argued

that sensemaking is driven by the perceived plausibility that a given narrative offers for

further action rather than the accuracy of the narrative.

Weick (1993) described the central activity of sensemaking as the social construction of a plausible order that accounts for as much experiential information as possible while reducing the equivocality experienced by organizational members to the lowest possible degree. This is accomplished through committed interpretation within an

82 organization, a term used to “highlight the social, symbolic nature of sensemaking and to designate binding action as the object of sensemaking” (Weick, 1993, p. 17). Essentially, he discussed how the process of committed interpretation makes sense of ambiguity and continual flux within an organization by introducing stability in the form of a justified social order, which can then be replicated by others within the organization to continue increasing stability (Weick, 1993).

In Sensemaking in Organizations, Weick (1995) extended his conceptual work and introduced seven properties of sensemaking in organizations. First, sensemaking is grounded in identity construction and the constructed identity of an individual or organization will vary from person to person based on their own interpretations. Second, sensemaking is retrospective and meaning will be derived when actions are reflected upon. Which means that third, sensemaking is a process of creative enactment, where communication or action become objects that are evaluated for their meaning within a specific environmental context. Fourth, sensemaking is social and the meaning of an action or communication is ascribed through both individual thinking and social functioning. Fifth, sensemaking is constant and ongoing across time, which means it is subject to salience at the time of reflection rather than in the moment. Sixth, sensemaking is dependent on the extracted cues noticed and focused on by an individual, as determined by their own interests and positioning within an organization. Seventh, and finally, the goal of sensemaking is plausibility, which allows an actor to create a set of next steps but does not rely on complete and accurate understanding of events.

A key point was that the process of organizing and the process of sensemaking are

mutually constituted, meaning that “the operative image of organization is one in which

organization emerges through sensemaking, not one in which organization precedes sensemaking or one in which sensemaking is produced by organization” (Weick et al.,

2005, p. 410). This mutual constitution highlighted two specific additions to the properties of sensemaking from Weick’s (1995) earlier work that provide insight into how actors ascribe meaning in equivocal situations: noticing and bracketing and labeling.

First, an organizational member notices a set of circumstances as different, causing ambiguity and dissonance, and then brackets those circumstances as dramatically different, subtly different, or unfamiliar and lacking context (Weick et al., 2005). Once a set of circumstances has been noticed and bracketed, it is then labeled as relevant and given shape and focus through communication to another party.

The process of sensemaking takes over as the organizational member searches for a plausible story that fits the perceived institutional identity and allows action to resume.

Weick et al. (2005) point to identity construction and the fundamental criterion of plausibility as the basic properties of the sensemaking process. Based on these two properties, the authors present a conceptual view of organizational sensemaking that is useful for analysis and is predicated on the ability of systems to respond to changes in the environment in an adaptive and evolutionary manner. The resulting enactment theory

“proposes that sensemaking can be treated as reciprocal exchanges between actors

(Enactment) and their environments (Ecological Change) that are made meaningful

(Selection) and preserved (Retention)” (Weick et al., 2005, p. 414). The next section

addresses some key epistemological changes from Weickian sensemaking to CSM.

Key epistemological changes. CSM addressed two limitations of Weick’s (1995)

work: weak epistemological grounding and an under-focus on the societal contexts of

organizations. Several scholars pointed to these limitations in applied studies and the

changes were made to increase the usefulness of the seven tenets as a heuristic for

analyzing organizations (Helms Mills et al., 2010). The changes also provided firmer

ideological ground for broadening the scope of the heuristic to include contextual factors.

To explain the first limitation, Helms Mills et al. (2010) highlight that Weickian

sensemaking is based loosely in postpositivist epistemology. It points to a scientifically-

grounded and definite set of activities of individual actors that lead to organizational

sense, but then contradicts itself by positing that sense emerges through a series of co- constructed, meaning-making interactions by organizational actors. Helms Mills et al.

(2010) argue that it can be both a recipe and a co-constructed process. The authors then introduce three strategies to address the problem: 1) grounding the knowledge base using a triangulation of epistemologies, specifically interpretivist, poststructural, and critical theory; 2) intentionally focusing on sensemaking as an analysis tool as opposed to a scientific tool; and, 3) owning outright that epistemological standards are inconsistent with the tenets of the chosen epistemologies. These changes allow us to better situate the process of sensemaking as an interaction between organizational actors and their societal context, thereby gaining greater meaning from what cues, plausible explanations, and socially acceptable choices are available to actors.

The second limitation is that Weickian sensemaking under-focuses on societal

context. This limitation is address in CSM by centering organizational actors’ identity construction as the key property of the original seven. The authors posit that an actor’s interpretation of who they are as individuals will affect their interpretation of the organization’s identity and act as filter for their experiences with the other six properties of sensemaking (Helms Mills et al., 2010). Essentially, CSM contextualizes an individual’s sensemaking with “how organizational power and dominant assumptions privilege some identities over others and create them as meaningful for individuals”

(Helms Mill et al., 2010, p. 188). Theoretically, the filtering effect of identity construction places in tandem the property of plausibility – an actor is likely to find the explanation that best fits with their perceived organization and individual identity the

most plausible. Helms Mills et al. (2010) proposed that CSM offers a frame of analysis

for what makes certain actions or beliefs the most plausible to an organizational actor by

analyzing the macro-level contexts in which sensemaking is occurring. The next section explains the elements of the macro-context and connects them to previously reviewed literature.

Elements of the CSM macro-context. Helms Mills et al. (2010) suggested that an organization’s macro-level context consists of three components: formative contexts, structural contexts, and discursive. Formative contexts are the “structures that limit what can be imagined and done within that society” (Helms Mills et al., 2010, p. 189). The sensemaking of organizational actors is viewed in relationship with the social norms and embedded values of the organization and the individual. The formative context of an

organization can be co-constructed by the individual and the organization, essentially being imagined and experienced concurrently in a way that links dominant social values

with individual action. A key example of formative context from the worldview literature

is how separation of church and state limits both concrete and imagined actions for

worldview exploration on campus.

Structural contexts are the encoded organizational practices that influence what

extracted cues are noticed and which explanations seem the most plausible (Helms Mills

et al., 2010). These practices could be written down, such as the policies governing how students ask for worldview-related accommodations from professors. However, they

could also be more subtly pervasive, such as how the fulfillment of student group funding

and space requests reveal certain biases on a campus. These practices govern how

individuals perform their roles within the organization while a broader set of meta rules

determines how the organization functions in relation to others (e.g., competition,

globalization, innovation; Helms Mills et al., 2010, p. 190). Even those actors who

possess significant organizational power will find their options constrained by the rules

and meta rules of the organization, at times significantly more than actors with less power

because they are subject to less structural context.

Finally, discursive contexts are described as the powerful, option-shaping

narratives that influence the sensemaking process by framing what identities are available

and what explanations are plausible to actors (Helms Mills et al., 2010). CSM highlights

the roles of power and privilege in organizational decision making, and discursive

contexts often inform who possesses power or privilege in a given organization. Relevant

87 to this review, the history of higher education as foundationally Christian overlaid with secular norms created a specific discursive context for the campus worldview climates.

Such embedded discourses are communicated by everyone and no one (e.g., Christian privilege) and are therefore difficult to reframe or redirect.

CSM as reviewed in this section is ideal for examining how organizational actors make sense of everyday interactions that cause ambiguity regarding appropriate and plausible next steps. It centers the identity construction processes of individuals and organizations, and provides a heuristic to examine how decision-making happens within an organization situated in a specific macro-context. I chose CSM over Weickian sensemaking because the messy worldview environment on public campuses does seem to constrain how students experience the campus worldview climate and inform their encounters across worldviews. I also appreciated the epistemological distinctions that

Helms Mills et al. (2010) made to transition Weick’s original work to CSM, especially their emphasis on sensemaking as a form of interpretation. In the next section, I review applications of sensemaking first through research that used Weickian sensemaking in higher education spaces and then how recent CSM scholarship reveals its usefulness for studying actor agency and contextual sensemaking.

Applications of Sensemaking and CSM

Sensemaking provides a particularly useful framework for examining decision- making processes within higher education institutions. These organizations regularly experience environmental pressures that are often magnified by their unique positioning at the nexus of the public and private sectors. Additionally, the interest of organizational

actors (e.g., students, faculty, staff, administrators) in finding plausible solutions that allow work to continue may play a key role in maintaining a status quo for diversity

initiatives despite an interest in changing the campus climate or operations in this area.

Weickian sensemaking in higher education. Institutions of higher education

have unique environments that respond to multiple market forces and are characterized

by many goals, diffused power structures, non-linear decision-making processes, and

highly politicized climates that make them interesting sites for strategic process research

(Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991). Large and complex organizations will perforce subject their

organizational members to vast amounts of equivocal information, which means the

sensemaking process is likely to occur regularly in order for operations to continue.

Research using Weickian sensemaking has focused on change processes and decision

making by administrators, faculty, and graduate students.

Examining change processes. In the late 1980s, Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991)

designed an ethnographic study based on Weick’s earlier contributions to organizational

literature that outlined meaning as socially-constructed and understanding and action as

based on interpretation. The catalyst for the study was the hiring of a new university

president tasked with launching a strategic change process that would better align the multi-campus university with the higher education market and increase its competitive capacities. Strategic change was defined as “an attempt to change current modes of

cognition and action to enable the organization to take advantage of important

opportunities or to cope with consequential environmental threats” (Gioia & Chittipeddi,

1991, p. 433). Interestingly, the president is cast as the organization’s CEO throughout

the study, showcasing how the university environment is being used an example case of

organizing from a business perspective for a business audience. These authors were the

first to link the emergent concepts of sensemaking and sensegiving to the higher

education environment.

The results of the study were two-fold, as the ethnographic findings were deduced

from both first-order and second-order analyses. The first-order findings showed an emerging four-step strategic change process that the embedded researcher labeled based

on his own experiences and conversations with other organizational members. The first step, envisioning, was engaged in only by the new president and almost entirely before he formally assumed his new position, as he used his own interpretive scheme based on his

own experiences to make sense of his new institution. The second step, signaling, was a

public framing from the president to the university community that change was going to

occur, and resulted in planned equivocality that the president could use to shape the

change effort. In this case, the president framed the direction of the change toward

becoming a “Top 10 University.” The third step, re-visioning, is where the organizational

members expressed various forms of opposition to the proposed strategic changes. These

took a variety of forms including direct opposition to a specific change, calls to slow the

pace of change, and encouragement to consult more intentionally with traditional power

holders on campus. The fourth step, energizing, took place over the vestiges of opposition

and slowly built institution-wide buy-in by including increasingly larger and lower level

audiences into the change process, eventually giving every stakeholder on campus

something to do to achieve the “Top 10 University” goal.

The second-order analysis reframed the first-order findings into a theoretical as opposed to descriptive framework, and suggested sensemaking and sensegiving as the two major dimensions. Sensemaking had to do with “meaning construction and reconstruction by the involved parties” as the strategic change process progressed, and sensegiving was an attempt to “influence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a preferred redefinition of organizational reality” (Gioia & Chittipeddi,

1991, p. 442). When combined with the first-order phases, a cyclic process of sensemaking and sensegiving emerges between the architects of the strategic change and the various stakeholders of the university. Sensegiving is a key addition to the sensemaking literature from this study because it is prospective rather than retrospective, and therefore a departure from Weick’s (1995) concepts. Additionally, the idea of ambiguity-by-design contributes to the literature on strategic change processes as a way to introduce the equivocality needed to invoke sensemaking without an organization experiencing a crisis (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991).

Gioia, Thomas, Clark, and Chittipeddi (1994) examined the role of symbolism as part of this university’s strategic change process, concluding that it aided the sensemaking activities of organizational members at all levels through meaning construction, expression, and action. The authors point to symbols as having the ability to influence sensemaking and also morph in meaning through the sensemaking process, allowing them to remain stable during the turbulent process of change. Continuing to work with the concepts of internal identity construction and external image projection,

Gioia and Thomas (1996) used the case study as a starting point to explore the

sensemaking of top management team members across academia more widely. Based on

their qualitative data, Gioia and Thomas (1996) identified a context for sensemaking

during a strategic change process that included an orientation toward the agreed-upon

strategy (i.e. becoming a “Top 10 university”) and an open structure for processing

information. Using this initial work, they surveyed top management team members at 439

institutions nationwide in order to test their theories. A key finding for our discussion of

sensemaking in academia is the authors’ conclusion that the sensemaking context of top

university management is internal to the organization, aligning with Weick’s (1995)

work.

Kezar and Eckel (2002) first explored the role of sensemaking in transformational

change through a multiple case study of six institutions that had been awarded funding to

pursue a transformational change process on their campuses. Transformational change addresses underlying assumptions and behaviors, pervasively affects the whole institution, is undertaken intentionally, and occurs over time (Kezar, 2013). Specifically, the authors were interested in exploring the process of transformational change as opposed to the inputs or outcomes. They found that five core strategies (senior

administrative support, collaborative leadership, robust design, staff development, and

visible action) were present on every campus that made significant progress toward their

transformational change goals. All five of these strategies were powerful due to “their

ability to help individuals conceptualize a new identity, to feel worthwhile about their

efforts, and to be brought along with the institutional agenda – what is labeled

sensemaking (Kezar & Eckel, 2002, p. 303).

Based on their findings, the authors labeled sensemaking as a “superordinate” strategy that described why and how these five core strategies were essential (Kezar &

Eckel, 2002, p. 313). Successful institutions engaged in sensemaking activities at the individual, group, and campus-wide levels, and a key role of senior administrators was ensuring that the campus environment was creating space for these sensemaking activities to occur. Kezar and Eckel (2002) suggest that large-scale institutional change is about meaning reconstruction, or organizational sensemaking, and that the five core strategies further previous work by offering ways to develop and operationalize sensemaking activities.

Kezar (2013) explored the experiences of several campuses working toward the same transformative change of institutionalizing interdisciplinary learning. In this study, she examined the sensemaking and sensegiving activities from the “bottom up” perspective of faculty as opposed to a “top down” perspective of campus executives and focused on how actors use sensemaking and sensegiving several years into their transformation process. The author found that sensemaking and sensegiving unfold similarly to Gioia and Chittipeddi’s (1991) four phases of envisioning, signaling, revisioning, and energizing, though noted that the process was more simultaneous and overlapping than linear in this study of lower-level actors.

Kezar (2013) identified three key elements that moved institutions toward their desired change: depth of process for individuals, breadth of engagement across both campus and departments, and connection of sensemaking/sensegiving activities with strategies for and barriers to change. She shared various ways that sensemaking and

sensegiving activities were utilized through three phases of change (mobilization,

implementation, and institutionalization) across various campus groups

(department/division, team, and campus-wide). Her analysis revealed that the most

common issue that stalled transformational change on campus was for sensemaking and

sensegiving to stop after the mobilization phase. Additionally, the “bottom up” approach

nuanced Gioia and Chittipeddi’s (1991) signaling phase into persuasion activities and

their energizing phase into garnering support or overcoming barriers (Kezar, 2013, p.

774).

Decision-making of administrators, faculty, and graduate students. The studies

above focused on the organizational aspects of Weickian sensemaking, generally only

exploring the individual actions of extremely high-level actors such as the president of an

institution. The studies in this section looked more granularly at the individual

sensemaking of administrators, faculty and graduate students.

Zerquera, Ballysingh, and Templeton (2017) used the organizational sensemaking

framework to examine how administrators upheld a university mission centered on access

and diversity at one Hispanic-Serving Institution. Similar to previously reviewed studies

of transformational change, the authors were interested in how the top management team

at this institution made sense of their organization’s mission, which then informed what

prospective sensemaking is offered to others on campus. They found that administrators

held closely to the institution’s historical mission of regional, urban access in a way that

inhibited them from using the current, diversity-centered mission as part of their sensemaking (Zerquera et al., 2017).

Instead of studying how sensemaking functioned as a tool within a specific strategic change process, Eddy (2003) examined how community college presidents helped their communities make sense of organizational change following their own sensemaking endeavors. She refers to these sensegiving efforts as a retrospective effort to

“frame change” for the college community through both formal and informal communication (Eddy, 2003, p. 456). She concludes that presidents can impact how their communities make sense of change by the frames (e.g., visionary, operational) they use when disseminating information. Eddy (2003) expands Weick’s work by focusing on institutional leaders and their ability to direct sensemaking on campus based on their own sensemaking of the organization’s change. These three studies examined various ways that sensemaking informs the strategic change process, which positions an organization in its external environment. In the following section, we review studies of large-scale organizational change that link the sensemaking process to successful transformation.

Faculty sensemaking has been interrogated related to university change efforts because the values, habits, and products of faculty members are less organized and less bottom-line oriented than their governing counterparts in the administration and on the

Board of Trustees (Birnbaum, 1988). Trowler and Knight (2000) explored how new tenure-track faculty members are socialized into their roles and how they construct their new identities having obtained a full-time faculty position. Also exploring faculty identity development, Wright (2005) studied established faculty members and their ways of constructing both individual and departmental identity as teachers at a research university. Chadwick and Pawlawski (2007) used sensemaking to examine how a specific

campus navigated the institutionalization of service-learning. Hora (2008) studied how

STEM faculty made sense of additional teaching requirements placed on them and proposed that situated cultural models could be used as a proxy for the sensemaking activities of faculty members in moments of increased equivocality due to environmental change (e.g., new department chair, new teaching requirement).

Gonzalez (2013) examined how faculty members made sense of their institution’s

strategic change process to reposition itself from a regional teaching institution to a tier-

one research institution. Faculty members perceived the shift would alter the identity of

the institution and require them to reconstruct their own identities as faculty members. In

this study, faculty members expressed that the administration did not understand the

magnitude of the change to tier-one status, showing that the sensegiving narrative offered

by the institution was implausible and therefore refuted. O’Meara, Lounder, and

Campbell (2014) found that faulty were likely to reduce ambiguity by pursuing explanations for faculty departure that were plausible, reduced ambiguity, and did not require changes in the status quo.

Tomlinson and Egan (2002) were among the first to employ Weick’s (1995) organizational sensemaking with students, specifically to explore how MBA students in a

UK-based program made sense of their experiences across cultures. The authors focused their analysis of participant narratives on instances where the most common, positively- oriented cultural diversity discourse was used to construct meaning and frame response and instances when that discourse seemed to fail the participants in their efforts to make sense of their cross-cultural interactions (Tomlinson & Egan, 2002). The authors found

that the positive diversity discourse was used by students in sensemaking about their

presence in the program, the multicultural composition of the students, and how they

could contribute to the program, but that they had no acceptable language to use when

they encountered dissonance through personal interactions with diverse others.

The sensemaking framework was used by Suspitsyna (2013) to examine the

experiences of international graduate students studying at a U.S. institution, though this

study focused on identity construction through the socialization process. Using a specific

analysis technique, the author examined the cues or signals students encountered that

invoked equivocality and triggered the sensemaking process as they retrospectively

reviewed their actions and reconstructed their identities and actions accordingly. In social

settings, international students often found themselves reconstructing their “we” and

“they” group identities as American peers unthinkingly assigned U.S.-based racial and

ethnic meanings to their stories, or their native script about diversities of gender and

sexuality conflicted with the U.S. context (Suspitsyna, 2013, p. 1360).

Summary. These studies used Weickian sensemaking within higher education contexts. The first group of studies examined how the broader organization made sense of large-scale change processes and focused their studies on the collective sensemaking process. The second group examined how administrators, faculty, and graduate students engaged in individual sensemaking as they grappled with specific changes occurring at their own higher education institutions. Notably, none of these studies focused on undergraduate students as sensemakers within higher education contexts.

Applications of CSM. CSM is a recent theory, added to the literature first in

2007 and then further expanded and explained by Helms Mills et al. (2010). CSM fundamentally contextualizes sensemaking at the individual and organizational levels in the broader contexts of power and privilege. It quickly gained traction and was applied in a variety of research studies, prompting Aromaa et al. (2018) to undertake a comprehensive review of studies using CSM over the last 15 years. Approximately 130 studies used CSM, and 51 were identified as most relevant to their comprehensive review process. The authors identified two categories of research concerning the experiences of the individual sensemaker: agency and contextual sensemaking. This section defines these two concepts and briefly shares research exemplars to showcase applications of

CSM to date.

Agency. A theoretical study of CSM explicated agency as an “individual’s ability to enact meaning in relation to the local site of sensemaking and organizing” (Thurlow &

Helms Mills, 2009, as cited in Aromaa et al., 2018, p. 186). Upon review, these studies illuminated how CSM contributed to the study of agency and how the macro-context becomes enacted in and around organizations. Three topical areas were covered amongst the 25 studies reviewed: change, discourse, and identity; gender and intersectionality; and, the experiences of immigrants. Two of the studies included as exemplars used interviews to gather their data and pointed to the limitations inherent in understanding how power dynamics manifested in the social dimension and the lack of peer interactions to call out hidden meaning. A third author pointed the usefulness of CSM for handling complex and confusing relationships between actors and embedded discourses, and also

98 commented that her participants anchored their identities in different ways throughout the sensemaking process.

Contextual sensemaking. Aromaa et al. (2018) describe contextual sensemaking as an examination of how sensemaking happens at the intersection of cognitive positioning and the macro-context. Early studies highlighting contextual sensemaking used Weick’s seven tenets alongside the formative, structural, and discursive contexts to examine how they shaped individuals’ process of making sense. More recent work less rigidly used Weickian sensemaking and shifted the focus of the empirical analysis toward an examination of how study participants described their own sensemaking during interviews. The two exemplar studies highlight the usefulness of CSM for examining the relationship between the sensemaker and the power structures of an organization that affect individual sensemaking.

Summary. The examination of how CSM has been applied to study the sensemaking of study participants is helpful for understanding how it could be used to study students’ encounters with worldview difference on public campuses. As previously discussed, students are already showing agency by participating in interfaith engagement activities, studying with students who hold different worldviews, and expecting campuses to provide welcoming climates for all worldviews. Contextual sensemaking is also alluded to in the literature as students delineated different levels of welcome in their campus climates predicated on a given worldview.

I believe CSM to be an appropriate framework for studying how students make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity on public campuses because it has

been used in studies with similarly complex contexts. As campus environments continue

to diversify and include more students ascribing to different worldviews (Cooperman,

Smith, & Ritchie, 2015), it is important that higher education professionals understand

how the macro-context might influence student sensemaking of worldview diversity.

CSM provided a structure to connect the sensemaking activities of students to the broader

societal context to see how power and privilege structures are influencing their process.

Summary

The literature I reviewed in this chapter first illuminated the national worldview

landscape, the picture of worldview diversity at public higher education institutions, and

the ways these institutions are predisposed to respond to changes in their environments.

Next, I examined the worldview history of higher education to understand what

underlying contexts may be informing the worldview climate. The history revealed that

public campus contexts have two worldviews present, a foundational Christian

orientation overlaid with operational secular practices. Additionally, the way that

separation of church and state has been outworked on public campuses over time has been to remove worldview exploration except as an academic exercise.

The following section turned from the campus context to the expectations and experiences of students. Many studies have shown that students expect their campus worldview climates to support their personal worldview explorations. Additionally, students are formally and informally engaging across worldview differences whether a support structure is present or not. Many students reported feeling the negative effects of the complex worldview climate of college campuses, such as inconsiderate remarks,

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marginalization, and lack of support. While it was clear from the literature that students

are encountering worldview difference and that these encounters were having an impact

on their college experience, there were no studies that examined how students were making sense of these encounters in the moment.

The final section reviewed critical sensemaking (CSM) and how it could be used to examine students as sensemakers of their encounters with worldview diversity. CSM provides a framework for examining individual sensemaking within a complex macro-

context like public higher education. In the next chapter, I review how I will use CSM to

explore how students at public institutions are making sense of their encounters with worldview diversity.

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Chapter 3. Methods

To focus on sensemaking is to portray organizing as the experience of being thrown into an ongoing, unknowable, unpredictable streaming of experience in search of answers to the question, “what’s the story?” (Weick et al., 2005, p. 410)

The purpose of this research was to explore how students navigate campus

environments that are increasingly diverse as it relates to worldview. My first objective

was to understand how students are making sense of their encounters with worldview

diversity in both curricular and co-curricular spaces. Based on the previously reviewed

literature, I was interested to see if student sensemaking reflected Weick’s seven

properties and the three influences of the macro-context of higher education. Given that

research has shown that various types of interfaith engagement positively impact a host of student outcomes (Astin et al., 2011; Rockenbach et al., 2017; Rockenbach et al.,

2018), it seemed probable that connecting across worldviews would impact the student

sensemaking in terms of identity construction and available plausible stories. To

investigate this, I employed a qualitative content analysis in this study because this

approach lends itself to the exploration of communicative text (e.g., focus group data); in

particular, a content analysis allows a researcher to systematically explore both manifest

(e.g., sensemaking properties) and latent (e.g., macro-context influences) meanings

(Saldaña, 2011). Additionally, content analysis is easily used with an a priori coding structure from a conceptual framework like critical sensemaking (CSM; Mayring, 2000).

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As described in chapter one, my research question was: How do students at public

institutions make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity?

In this chapter, I first explain my own sensemaking process as I approached this

work, describing my ontology and epistemology through the mechanism of autobiography. Then I turn to a description of the data set that includes an overview of

the demographic mix of the student focus group participants and the institutions they

attended. Then, I articulate how I used content analysis as a tool to make sense of the

focus group transcripts and recordings. Next, I comment on my role in making sense of

the findings and reporting them in a way that showcases students' stories of encounters across worldview difference. I conclude with my steps to ensure trustworthiness and a brief summary of the chapter.

Making My Own Sense: Ontology and Epistemology

My approach to this research is rooted in my own sensemaking as both a practitioner and a researcher. In chapter one, I reviewed how my worldview changed during college and complicated both my life and my experience of the campus worldview climate at my public institution. Concurrently, my higher education story started as I became an undergraduate leader in the division of student affairs. For me, worldview exploration and student affairs work have always intertwined, and I have seemingly always been trying to make sense of them in tandem. The critical sensemaking (CSM) framework centers identity construction as the primary activity of sensemaking and plausibility as the primary outcome (Helms Mills et al., 2010). Accordingly, to frame this

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discussion of methods, I will share how I have constructed my identity as a researcher

and how this study constitutes a plausible path forward.

Early in my doctoral program, we learned about the various ontologies and

epistemologies associated with being a researcher. I thought of this exercise in two

questions: How does my ontology inform what can be known? How does my epistemology inform how I will acquire knowledge? While I found the philosophical debates about the nature of existence and qualities of truth interesting, I realized my ontological stance was heavily informed by my own worldview. I had not asked myself ontological questions before I became a Christian, but my interpretation of Christian thought posits that all things are knowable but I cannot know all things. Comfortable with this answer to the question of ontology, I moved to the more complicated epistemological question.

I have always desired to do and be useful. I believe that one of the appeals of student affairs work was that it was eminently practical, providing for the most basic needs of students while helping them succeed. Accordingly, I approach this work from a pragmatic epistemology with constructivist leanings, as I consider knowledge “both constructed and based on the reality of the world we experience and live in” (Burke

Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004, p. 18). Typically, pragmatists use a combination of methods that will allow the results of their research to best address the “issue” or

“problem” that inspired the study (Creswell & Miller, 1997) as they place equal value on observations, experiences, and experiments as ways to gain knowledge (Burke Johnson &

Onwuegbuzie, 2004). Ultimately, pragmatists hope to learn about truth through the way it

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is experienced in the world – we understand “meaning… by reference to experiential

consequences” (Haack, 1976, p. 236) that occur when the truth itself is in practice.

Pragmatic researchers are often drawn to mixed-method research because a more well-

rounded view of a phenomenon is available when studied from several angles (Creswell,

2013). Pragmatists view gains in knowledge produced through a research study as less

important than the solutions generated to address the relevant issue or problem (Creswell

& Miller, 1997).

Though the pragmatic viewpoint resonates with me, the paradigm does not explicitly account for my experiences understanding certain concepts or ideas differently

when I construct them in certain spaces or with certain people. In many ways, I have

found knowledge more contextualized and truth more faceted when it is informed by and

with the experiences of others. For example, I recognized that those who have had

different life events or lived in other geographic locations had helped me "know"

something in a new way. Therefore, I also believe that knowledge is subjective and changes in context over time (Creswell, 2013). Making sense occurs in the context of community and meanings are “formed through interaction with others… and through historical and cultural norms that operate in individuals’ lives” (Creswell, 2013, p. 25). I believe a constructivist epistemology is crucial to this work, especially because my social

identities often do not overlap with those of my participants (Jones, Torres, & Arminio,

2006). My identity as a devout evangelical Christian cisgender woman from a white,

middle-class, highly formally educated family background will inform how I make sense of new information and incorporate it as knowledge. For this study, I examined the

105 stories of students from several public institutions who did not share my worldview or worldview expression. For me to honor the stories, histories, and experiences of my participants, I needed to remain open to re-constructing knowledge and truth with them.

This study constitutes a plausible path forward in my desire to better understand campus worldview climates and student experiences within them. I am drawn to projects that have practical outcomes and am open to switching epistemological stances, methodologies, and audiences in order to better situate results for implementation. I believe that understanding student sensemaking about worldview diversity is relevant to not only my own research interests but those of the nation and world as the competence to navigate cross-worldview encounters is needed among the workforce and citizenry.

Additionally, public institutions must recognize the limitations present on campus due to history, unwritten rules, as well as deep-seated and divergent ideological norms. I hope that my pragmatic, constructivist orientations as a researcher served me and my participants well as I made sense of the data.

Description of the Data: Student Sensemakers

As a research associate for the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes

Survey (IDEALS) study, I had the opportunity to participate in the focus group data collection at several sites. My interest was piqued when I heard how students framed their experiences to help us understand their campus worldview climates. Because of my own background, I was specifically interested to learn about some familiar themes in the accounts from students at public institutions. I wanted to know more about what experiences, influences, and considerations students brought into those sensemaking

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moments. Before describing how I approached examining the in-the-moment

sensemaking process, this section provides an overview of the dataset.

Brief Overview of IDEALS

IDEALS is a grant-funded longitudinal mixed-methods study designed to explore

student outcomes related to interfaith and worldview diversity across the college experience. These outcomes specifically include students’ pluralism orientation, commitment to their own worldviews, and perceptions of the campus climate in relation to worldview diversity (“About IDEALS,” 2017). Based on two previous cross-sectional research projects focused on worldview diversity and interfaith engagement on campus,

Drs. Matthew J. Mayhew and Alyssa N. Rockenbach partnered with the Interfaith Youth

Core (IFYC) to engage in a third mixed-method longitudinal study to further investigate religion, spirituality, and worldview on 122 campuses across the country (“About

IDEALS,” 2017). The qualitative dimension of the study utilizes a multiple case study design (Stake, 2006) to examine the worldview climate and experiences of interfaith engagement at a subset of 18 diverse colleges and universities.

Potential case study sites were chosen in Spring 2017 by looking for institutions where students demonstrated either high or low change on the developmental outcomes

(e.g., pluralism orientation) during the first year of college relevant to the amount of formal interfaith work on each campus. Each IDEALS case study visit was conducted over a three-day period and included student focus groups, interviews with faculty, staff, and administrators, observations of events and spaces, and summary conversations with key contacts.

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Student participants were required to have sophomore standing or above. Campus contacts were encouraged to advertise the focus groups widely while sending more targeted invitations to student leaders and members of faith, interfaith, and non-religious groups. Three focus groups were scheduled on each campus and typically comprised of

4-10 students each, lasting for approximately 90 minutes (see Appendix A for the general focus group protocol). A member of the IDEALS team would track student interest with a survey and send a confirmation email to each student participant with the date, time, and location of their group along with a consent form and demographic survey for review. Each student received a $15 Amazon gift card emailed to them within a week of the campus visit for their participation in the study.

I used the audio recordings and transcripts of 15 student focus groups from the five public institutions as the primary data sources. Focus group interviews are frequently used in the social sciences to allow research participants to share their experiences and perceptions in a supportive environment guided by a group facilitator posing specific, focused questions (Marshall & Rossman, 2014). They offer dynamic data shaped by the interaction between the researcher and the participants, allowing for rich descriptions, probing follow-up questions, and most importantly relevant information pertaining to the issue or problem (Stake, 2006). This construction of the interview space positions the facilitator and interviewees as active participants communicating together to produce a story consistent with their experiences (Reissman, 2008). Additionally, I had access to the self-reported demographic data provided by each student participant and associated with their chosen pseudonym.

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Description of the Participants

This study concentrated on the student experiences at five public institutions that

participated in the case study portion of the IDEALS project. Typically, public

institutions are the most reflective of the national and global macro-context due to their

open nature, variety of academic enterprises, and reliance on both public and private

funding (Cohen, 1998). Geographically, two institutions were in the South, two in the

Midwest, and one in the West. The following reference names will be used throughout

this study: Heartland State, Midwest University, Southeast State, Southern University,

and West University. Table 1 highlights select characteristics of these institutions.

Table 1

Select Institutional Characteristics Institution Region Affiliation Size Barron's Indexa Heartland State Plains Public 3,000-12,000 Competitive

Midwest University Great Lakes Public > 12,000 Competitive

Southeast State Southeast Public > 12,000 Very Competitive

Southern University Southeast Public > 12,000 Competitive

West University Far West Public > 12,000 Very Competitive

aBarron’s Profiles of American Colleges (2015)

The participants included in this study represented diverse worldviews as well as other social identity characteristics (see Mayhew, Rockenbach, Correia et al., 2016, p. 4

for IDEALS categorizations). In total, about 40% of participants were worldview

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majority students (e.g., Roman Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, etc.), 35% were

nonreligious (e.g., Atheist, Secular Humanist, Spiritual, etc.), 20% were worldview

minority students (e.g., Hindu, Muslim, Native American traditions, etc.), and 3%

ascribed to another worldview (i.e., identities that do not align elsewhere; see Table 2 for a numerical breakdown by institution). Approximately 40% of the participants identified as students of color, 55% identified as women, and 68% as heterosexual. See Appendix B for a table of demographics by institution and participant.

Table 2

Student Participants by Institution and Worldview Category Total Worldview Worldview Institution Nonreligious Another Participants Majority Minority Southern 12 8 1 2 1 University Southeast 11 4 4 3 0 State Midwest 15 6 5 4 0 University Heartland 12 4 1 5 1 Statea West 10 2 0 7 1 University aOne student indicated "prefer not to respond"

Data Analysis: Noticing, Bracketing, and Labeling

Qualitative content analysis involves three phases: preparation, organization, and

reporting (Elo et al., 2014). The preparation phase includes data collection, sampling

strategy, and determining the appropriate unit of analysis. As the data had already been

collected for this study, I turn to the sampling strategy within the collected body of data.

Though 18 case studies were completed, I specifically targeted the student data at the five 110

public institutions as the most likely to have worldview diverse student bodies (Cohen,

1998). Within those five cases, I used the audio recordings and transcripts of only the

student focus groups in order to examine how students themselves reflected on their

sensemaking processes. The 15 focus group transcripts included the voices of 60 students

across the five institutions, thus offering a rich but diverse subset of data for the content

analysis. For the unit of analysis, I assigned codes to “chunks” of data that maintain a

single theme or topic and are directly related to the research question (Zhang &

Wildemuth, 2017, p. 3) regardless of the specific size of the phrase or stanza of data. I utilized the Dedoose qualitative coding software to assist with data analysis.

Content Analysis

For this study, I was interested in employing an analysis approach that was structured but able to be adapted along the way. Elo et al. (2014) supported using content analysis in this way and described the various phases of content analysis by the primary reasoning strategy. First, the researcher employs inductive reasoning to derive the initial coding categories and definitions from the conceptual framework. Deductive reasoning is then used to apply the coding scheme systematically to the data. Finally, abductive reasoning is used to create a feedback loop that allows the researcher to revise and refine the coding categories throughout the analysis process (Elo et al., 2014; Saldaña, 2011). I appreciated the consistent, step-by-step content analysis process (Mayring, 2000) because it helped account for the slight but inevitable variations that occur when qualitative data is collected by a team of researchers across both time and space.

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Saldaña (2011) described content analysis as ideal for categorizing

communicative text data, determining patterns, and drawing comparisons across

categories. It was an appropriate procedure to explore sensemaking because it is a process

for creating order out of flux (Weick, 1993). Though the structural coding process used

an a priori code-set based on the critical sensemaking theory, Mayring's (2000) content analysis process encourages the researcher to make sense of the data iteratively and revise the coding agenda throughout the analysis. It allows the researcher to continually make sense of the data both retrospectively and enacted with data in the present, three hallmarks of the sensemaking structure. Additionally, the goal of content analysis is to reduce the data until the researcher can understand and describe the phenomenon from the distilled results (Mayring, 2014), which is akin to the central sensemaking property of

identity construction. These parallels helped easily fit content analysis to both the data

and the conceptual framework.

Structural coding. A well-organized analysis ensures that the procedures reflected the conceptual framework of the study and clearly articulated how the concepts or categories were created (Elo et al., 2014). In order to best reflect the CSM categories, I engaged in a deductive structural coding process to apply a priori codes based on the critical sensemaking concept (Saldaña, 2016). This type of coding was ideal for transcripts generated by focus group interview protocols because it provided a consistent analysis tool to apply across less consistently gathered data. Additionally, structural coding was conducive for use with a specific conceptual framework like CSM that already contains embedded analytical categories. Table 3 contains my final coding

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Table 3

Structural Coding Agenda Code Definition Example Rules identity constructed my friend circle [at home] was Reflects their own construction identity of an predominantly all-Asian. Then coming worldview individual or here was kind of a cultural shock because development process organization; will everyone was predominantly white. I Reflects the vary by personal thought I wouldn't be able to fit in, but I worldview identity interpretation found people, and definitely expanded my of the institution comfort zone, and also I got to see what people that were not really like me thought. retrospective sense is derived I was in an enviro class that, for example, Discusses reflection when actions are had like a whole lecture on how in the past tense that reflected upon Christianity had contributed to the lead to making sense destruction of the planet. Which was interesting and fine but the environment of not respecting that there might have been people in that room, that there were people in that room who held very dearly to the belief as part of the way they looked at the world was definitely, it was ignored on this like assumption that everyone was on the same very liberal, very nonreligious field of having this kind of worldview. creative communication or I would have to agree with the three of Examples of enactment action become them to an extent, but at the same time, all conversations or meaningful the times we use the word "allow." So what activities that have objects evaluated they're allowed to express such and such specific meaning due within a specific but under the Constitution, we have that to an encounter with environmental right to do such a thing. A lot of times, it's worldview diversity context like oh we're allowed to do this based on our religion but we should have that right too social an action or But once you finally get a personal Reflects communal communication is connection with them and start sensemaking of ascribed sense understanding more in depth about what worldview or through individual they believe and what they do, you finally worldview diversity thinking and social start opening up the door of acceptance and Reflects personal or functioning realizing that they're just the same type of group development people you are. They're same people, same of worldview within humans, they just have different beliefs a group context that you've only known for the longest time were bad.

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Table 3, Continued Code Definition Example Rules constant and sense is subject to And you see that with people who try new Verbal indication ongoing salience at the things whether that's classes, drugs, that sense is time of reflection whatever. And people are sort of forming currently being made rather than when it their own worldviews and informing new of an incident (I feel, occurs worldviews. I think people kind of start thinking about it with more of a blank slate which is easily now, etc.) that like this is the world and that's all there is and all I have to worry about is now and me. Which might just be a maturity thing because everyone is like 18 and stupid. extracted Only actions or I do remember last year after the elections, Reflects drawing cues communications with the election who, you know, I won't conclusions from noticed by an name, but who won, after that there was a specific information individual impact lot of uproar here at the university and on presented their sensemaking social media there was incidents of people Reflects the who were shouting profanity and things speaker’s connection such as like, "Go back to your country." between the story or Or, you know, "Your religion's encounter and blasphemy." Or things that were targeting worldview diversity the minority group that the president Keywords: safety, elected was trying to convey a negative media, social media thought towards, and so people just kind of wrapped on that and took that flame and enlightened it on campus. plausibility goal is to ... it's not necessarily the students Reflects the determine a set of becoming of themselves and leading each individual’s reasonable next other, it's more of this very dominant reasoning on why steps rather than a advisor who's bringing them all under an someone else is complete and umbrella and keeping them in their behaving a certain accurate different silos. I wish maybe, if the way understanding of advisors ... if there was that interfaith Describes a process events conversation between advisors that would or path to facilitate that, there's a lot less internal reconciling others student leadership to provide some of that actions into an dynamic in those conversations that could understood happen. framework formative the co-constructed I actually work downstairs in the Student Reflects the context nature of the Activities and Greek Life suite and I would formative contexts of macro-context that just say looking at it from the community, I public higher links dominant feel like the- what's more comfortable here education broadly social values with in the South, like the Christian based Reflects the individual action organizations probably do a little bit more formative contexts of like BCM and the Catholic Student the institution Association. …The Baptist Campus specifically Ministries. I just feel like they get out their word a little bit more just because that tends to be what's more accepted here in the South.

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Table 3, Continued Code Definition Example Rules structural the standard social I think I was actually here a half year before Stories or encounters context practices for “how I found out about the Jewish/Muslim that reflect things get done” interfaith dialogue. … it wasn't announced seemingly standard in an organization in class, or anything. I guess I just managed practices at the to meet enough people that I somehow institution that heard about it. And, uh ... So, I really don't impact student know how many people know what's sensemaking of happening, in that it's won awards. worldview diversity on campus discursive the narratives that For me, I am also a black student and so Reflect broad context influence the very rarely in class do I ever use dialect. narratives that would sensemaking The thing is I'm a verbal processor, so the seem to affect all process by best way for me to learn would be to speak public institutions in framing what in a tongue that is more native to my mind, some way identities are but I have to spend so much processing Reflect local available and power, carefully monitoring the way I'm narratives that limit what explanations saying my words so that they will not be ill options and are plausible at received, that I kind of lose out a little bit explanations the time on that experience.

agenda, which includes codes, definitions, examples, and rules (Mayring, 2000).

Consistent with Mayring’s (2014) explanation of the content analysis procedure, the examples and rules for each code were completed throughout the analysis process based on both the conceptual framework and the textual material, and iteratively revised as the analysis proceeded (see Appendix B for a process flowchart). At the end of the structural coding process, I had generated 451 unique excerpts across the 15 focus group transcripts. To ensure consistency, I checked and recoded the first transcripts completed with the final coding agenda, reducing the total number of excerpts to 446 in that process.

Additionally, the three influences of the macro-context (formative, structural, and discursive contexts) were part of the a priori coding agenda based on the CSM framework. Over 150 excerpts, approximately one-third of all excerpts, reflected at least one of the three influences. The macro-context coding most commonly co-occurred with

115 the sensemaking activities of plausibility (50) and extracted cues (49) while co- occurrences with the other five properties were less than half that number. Examining the body of excerpts associated with each of the a priori codes helped me understand what sensemaking properties were most employed by students and how the macro-context influenced student sensemakers.

Data Interpretation and Reporting: Making Sense of the Findings

To discover how students were making sense of their encounters with worldview diversity, I examined the chunks of data associated with each of the structural codes. I used two analytic tables available through the Dedoose software to begin this analysis.

The first was a chart that counted code applications by focus group transcript (see

Appendix D), and the second counted all code co-occurrences as a matrix. I reviewed the breakdown of structural coding applications, which revealed that four of the a priori sensemaking codes were applied over 100 times each. The breakdown of code applications was identity construction (100), retrospective (51), creative enactment (46), social (112), constant and ongoing (62), extracted cues (102), and plausibility (111). I exported the associated excerpts from the Dedoose software by structural code in order to have a pool of excerpts for each code to analyze.

I approached each subset of the data wanting to understand how students were exhibiting the particular property or influence. I used the coding agenda as a guide to narrow the pool of excerpts to the ones that best showcased the process, constantly referring to the definition, exemplar quote, and situated rules I had used for the coding.

At times, I found student stories represented a piece at a time throughout the focus group,

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so I would hold those quotes together to better understand their individual experience.

During this portion of the data analysis, my first goal was to understand how students

were exhibiting the property or influence in their individual sensemaking. My second

goal was to have a smaller pool of 5 to 10 rich exemplar excerpts of each property or influence in action to use for reporting. Finally, I noted any broader themes that emerged about student sensemaking for later discussion.

In determining the best way to report the findings, I wanted to ensure that student

voices were centered, that the selected excerpts reflected both student and institution

diversity, and that the sensemaking property or influence was evident. I used a parallel

structure in my findings section to help ensure these goals were met. First, I introduced the property or influence to remind the reader of the definition and rules used throughout the analysis. Second, I used students' direct quotes from the focus group data to tell

"sensemaking stories" that highlighted the property or influence. Third, I presented a brief analysis of the data and comment on any broader themes that emerged for the property or influence.

Researcher in Context: Trustworthiness

My relationship to this data is unique because I have been serving as a logistic coordinator, on-site data collector, and data analyst as a research associate on the

IDEALS project. While Stake’s (2006) recommendations for multicase analysis are predicated on a team effort, as typically multicase studies are not undertaken by a single researcher, I am attentive to the tensions created by using some data that I collected as a primary researcher and some that is completely secondary to me because other members

117 of the research team completed the site visit. Additionally, the qualitative portion of the

IDEALS study used Stake’s (2006) multicase analysis techniques as a guide for the

IDEALS project and my research question and study design are intrinsically different.

I engaged in several practices to ensure the trustworthiness of my study (Creswell,

2013). First, I triangulated findings between the student focus groups, the broader findings of the IDEALS case study, and the literature to ensure that the findings and assertions were well situated in the institutional and national contexts. Second, I engaged in reflexivity throughout the coding, analysis, and reporting processes by maintaining a researcher journal of my own thoughts and interpretations of the data, debriefing with team members, and returning regularly to the guiding literature. Finally, the findings section included significant direct quotes from the participant data provided through the focus groups. These quotes allow for the reader to determine the credibility of the assertions about student sensemaking and its transferability to other contexts.

Summary

This chapter described my methodological approach to answering the following research question: How are students at public institutions making sense of their encounters with worldview diversity? First, I described my sensemaking about my ontological and epistemological stances and how they informed my approach to this study. I then offered background on the data used in this study, including a brief overview of the IDEALS project and demographic descriptions of the participants and institutions. Next, I reviewed qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2000; Saldaña, 2011) and commented on how it is appropriate to use with the type of data generated by focus

118 groups; furthermore, I articulated how I conducted the content analysis using structural and content coding treatments. I followed this with an overview of my process for interpreting and reporting the findings. Finally, I stated how I ensured trustworthiness throughout the research process. The next chapter presents the findings of this study using quotes from students to showcase how they engaged the seven properties of sensemaking in their encounters across worldview difference and were influenced by the macro-contexts of higher education.

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Chapter 4. Findings

As sensemaking is not a linear process, analysis does not happen in a particular sequence. Although some properties may become more visible from time to time, the sensemaking properties may also influence individual sensemaking simultaneously. (Helms Mills et al., 2010, p. 189).

This chapter is organized to reflect the structure of the coding agenda and highlight the sensemaking stories of students in relation to each property (identity construction, retrospective, creative enactment, social, constant and ongoing, extracted cues, and plausibility) or influence (formative, structural, or discursive contexts). I report the findings using a parallel structure with each section containing a definition the property or influence, a description of its occurrence in the data, exemplar quotes from student participants to show how the property or influence informs their next steps, and finally, the sections end with a brief analysis of how students made sense of their encounters with worldview diversity.

Identity Construction

Central to sensemaking activities are the constructed identities of an individual or organization, though exactly how these identities are constructed and how those constructions inform sensemaking depends on the individual actor. I coded excerpts as examples of identity construction for two reasons. First, and most often, the student participant shared examples concerning their own worldview development process. For some individuals, the way the worldview climate of their college campus was different 120 than their pre-college environments prompted them to engage in sensemaking. For others, a cross-worldview encounter was a major impetus.

The second reason for the identity construction code was if students commented on how they perceived the institution's actions as reflective of its values or priorities.

These comments were rare and usually tied to a longer story of the student's experiences navigating a particular aspect of the campus worldview climate. Frequently, these types of passages reflected the influence of the macro-context in addition to student constructions of institutional identity.

Sensemaking Stories

This section shares several excerpts where student stories reflected the sensemaking property of identity construction. I have included the pseudonym and institution of each student sensemaker as well as contextual information that connects the students' story shared throughout a focus group. These sensemaking stories are exemplars because they showcase how the students related their encounter with worldview difference to the constructed identity of themselves or their institutions.

Leaf, West University. Leaf's story highlighted the sensemaking property of identity construction and was primarily prompted by the differences she noted between the campus worldview climate of West University and her pre-college experiences. In response to a question asking how her worldview changed during college, Leaf shared:

My family is Daoist, but I don't really understand too much of it because it's more

my parents' and grandparents' kind of thing. But when I came to college, I kind of

tried to experiment with a new religion, like Christianity. I joined InterVarsity,

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but it wasn't really for me. I didn't really find it very meaningful. I think my

worldview has changed a little bit during college because I did a study abroad,

and I met a lot of different people. I feel like we're all connected in some way,

whether it be beliefs or relationships. I feel that we all kind of want the same

things in life, and all believe that if you work hard, you will be rewarded.

In this response, she recognizes worldview differences within her family becoming more apparent as she switches contexts. While both her parents and grandparents ascribe to

Daoist worldviews, she realizes she does not and begins searching for her own worldview identity. Once on campus, she first searches for meaning with a Christian group but decides against it. She then searches for meaning in a new physical space during a study abroad trip establishing a belief system that is makes sense to her but does not align with either her Daoist family or her attempt with Christianity.

After listening to several other students’ responses to the question, Leaf volunteered some additional information about how the worldview climate was different at West University:

I think what was big for me was moving to [the area of West University] because

I'm originally from California… and my friend circle was predominantly all

Asian. Then coming here was kind of a cultural shock because everyone was

predominantly white. I thought I wouldn’t be able to fit in, but I found people, and

definitely expanded my comfort zone, and also I got to see what people that were

not really like me though.

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This statement reflects how Leaf considered factors like her ethnicity and culture as part of her worldview. The contextual change from an all-Asian environment to a predominantly white environment required her to figure out how her identity fit in. Leaf's sensemaking story is an exemplar of how changing worldview climates can require students to engage in sensemaking.

Chandler, Southern University. Chandler's identity construction stemmed from moments when she recognized circumstances that were different for her as a Catholic student than for friends who held other worldviews. Responding to a question about how her attitudes toward other worldviews or people holding other worldviews have changed during college, Chandler described the following memory:

I remember when I was in high school, I remember one big time my view

changed. I had a Muslim friend and she wore a hijab and I told her that I liked it,

it was really pretty and she was surprised that I knew what it was and I didn't just

[sic] be afraid of her. I remember one time some kid in the hallway told her,

"Don't bomb the place." So she was really emotional about that and to have

somebody that understood, like I understand that's what you want to do and it's

not just like you're forced to do it and it doesn't make you a terrorist or anything

like that. It was really comforting to her and it made me feel good that I

understood somebody else's religion.

Chandler recognized this pre-college experience of connecting across worldviews as part

of how she constructed her own identity when encountering worldview difference. It

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seemed she valued these cross-worldview connections, as Chandler continued to share

about two close friends who held different worldviews throughout the focus group.

One friend was a Muslim woman who wore hijab and the other a Hindu woman.

Chandler noticed that it might be more difficult for her friends to understand their place on campus compared to her own experiences. In hearing that the IDEALS data seemed to show that students at her institution exhibited less good will than the national average toward different religious and nonreligious perspectives, she reflected:

…it's harder to feel more welcome when not everybody believes the same thing as

you or when there's not a person who says, "You know, it's okay to believe in

that." Like I said, it's only two religions represented in buildings, like the CSA or

Catholic church and the Baptist Campus Ministries. Those are the only two

religious buildings we have, and so if you're Muslim, if you're Indian, if you're

Asian, you don't have that, and the university doesn't really back you as much

because you're a minority.

Chandler's statement suggested that the campus worldview climate of Southern

University was perhaps not as different from the surrounding community, given the

worldview diversity present among the students.

How the identity of the institution was presented through available resources

seemed to affect Chandler's sensemaking on many fronts and she commented on this

topic several times. At another point in the focus group, she offered this example:

We don't have a lot of classes on these different faiths or these different religions

but we have them on Christianity or they just added a minor for Judaism and the

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Holocaust Studies, but we don't have anything that you can study Hinduism or

that you can study the Quran or anything like that, or not that I know of at least.

It seemed that Chandler's observations about the lack of campus resources available to learn about other worldviews reinforced her perception that Southern University was

more prepared to support Christian students. This perception prompted her to continue

making sense of how the campus environment might affect her non-Christian friends.

An additional component of Chandler's sensemaking involved how her

experiences and expectations about people holding different worldviews did not align

with her family's views. When the focus group facilitator shared that interfaith

engagement at Southern University is significantly less than national norm, Chandler

explained her perspective by sharing the following story about interactions with her

mother:

It's sort of that we're stuck in our ways sort of thing for the South, because my

mom, she's very tentative about Muslim culture and Muslim religion. She's a

police officer and I remember one day they had to go to a training session to

where, how to handle a terrorist or a bomber. Of course, in the training videos,

most of them were Muslim and she was afraid for me and my sister to coming to

school knowing that South was a diverse campus. Even my Hindu friend, who I

kept having to tell her is from India and is not Middle Eastern, she was like,

"Don't go anywhere. She tells you she wants you to meet some of her friends,

don't do this." I was like, "Calm down." …It was frustrating because I'm a very

open person, I always have been. I've loved making friends, so all my friends

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have never just been black or never just been white or whatever. I understood my

friend's of a different religion than what my mom believed her to be, and she's

also a really good person, and a majority of Muslim people are also very good

people. For my mom to not accept that or to not understand, for her to have that

block of Muslim people are dangerous, it was kind of heart wrenching for me

because I wanted her to understand that my friend … she's a great person, she's a

really sweet girl, but she wears a hijab. Her religion is very visible. I don't walk

about with a rosary around my neck, so you wouldn't know if I was Catholic

unless you ask me or if I told you.

Overall, Chandler's sensemaking was centered in the various ways she was constructing her identity as someone who identified as Catholic and grew up in the South. Having close friends who identified with other worldviews caused her to examine both her belief system and the ways Southern University did and did not support students holding minority worldviews.

Shaq, Midwest University. As a Muslim student at Midwest University, Shaq's story highlighted several avenues he used to help others make sense of his own worldview. Throughout the focus group, he relayed how he participated in several formal interfaith activities through his local mosque as part of his own efforts to assist people in understanding his worldview and not to see Islam only through news and media. He described one of these events, saying:

We have an open mosque day during Ramadan, which is the most holiest [sic]

time of our religion. We open up our mosque for non-Muslims to come in and to

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visit, to see how we pray, to see how we worship in the sense of breaking our fast,

which is for a Muslim the most important and most beautiful time in one's life, to

just show that off. You know? To express this is how my religion is. For our

community to come in and to actually engage with us and to sit down and try to

learn about what Islam is versus what they see on TV. That actually makes our

Muslim community, as well as the [local] community look good. It makes us that,

hey, look, we're more willing to actually take initiatives, and step up, to actually

learn about your religion versus hear about and accept what we hear on the news.

So for that, that actually made me feel good about myself, about how I feel about

my religion, and made me more of a better person, more accepting towards others

knowing that one can be rather open-minded. Your neighbor can be more open-

minded than just say, "Hi, hello," type of person.

During this story, Shaq revealed several ways he's made sense of worldview diversity through identity construction. First, he's determined that his own Muslim identity is not well understood on campus and engaged in opportunities to showcase Islam to those who are less familiar. Second, he identified himself as a member of the campus community who has a responsibility to build and change it from within. Finally, he considered how these efforts have helped him become a "better person" through breaking down the assumptions he held of those outside his Muslim community through the cross- worldview interactions.

His story also highlighted some dichotomies he experienced on campus. When asked if he felt the campus was welcoming, he responded by saying: "The climate here is

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really welcoming here. Not only from the students, but also from the community…. That

is one of the nicest things that [Midwest] has offered. It's because there's always a safe

space type deal." Shaq also mentioned that he felt comfortable expressing his worldview on campus. His ability to be open about his Muslim identity was part of how he made

sense of the campus worldview climate. However, at one point he did note a discrepancy,

stating:

So the mosque down the street is specifically not ... Unfortunately, they're not

connected like other churches. A church representative is connected with the

[Midwest] university. However, one of our representatives at the mosque is not

connected … Just because of, I guess, some policies or whatever that

unfortunately we're not able to take part in it. The group that was the MSA

[Muslim Student Association] here has advertised and those students who were

there did show up. So though we didn't have a big turnout, we did have a turnout

for like our neighbors, for our Christians down the street as well as some of the

Jews that were on the other side. So, that was a very good time.

This example showed how it might be difficult for Shaq to reconcile his evolving desired

identity of being part of the community with the location and privileges afforded the local

mosque. This is a set of circumstances that Shaq has noticed and bracketed, but

seemingly not labeled as different enough to require sensemaking.

Analysis: Identity Construction

Participants often noticed the difference in contexts between “home” and the

college campus, which prompted sensemaking by introducing worldview diversity into

128 their lives. Throughout the focus groups, many students reflected being from a small town where everyone held very similar worldviews and so any additional diversity was helpful. Like Leaf, several students discussed a geographic relocation that changed the surrounding area enough to prompt sensemaking. Students equally described changing or maintaining their own worldviews in light of their changed contexts and were often excited that they were encountering a new worldview climate that challenged them to examine their worldviews.

Students also regularly described becoming friends with someone before knowing their worldview and then starting to make sense of their worldviews with the goal of maintaining the friendship. As in Chandler's story, these relationships were often associated with students recognizing that the resources available were not the same across all worldviews. Once these circumstances were labeled as different by the students, students attempted to make sense of why their institutions would have disparate class offerings or available student groups. Chandler's conclusion, that "the university doesn't really back you as much because you're a minority," showed how these differences tended to influence students' perceptions of their institutions.

Another common theme associated with the identity construction property was experiencing personal growth as part of their sensemaking process. Growth manifested as either an internal process in which students conveyed learning more about themselves or an external process in which students felt better able to relate to other people, like Shaq's experience with the open mosque day. The word “open” was often used to describe the effect of the campus worldview climate on students' identity construction, connoting that

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they were able to explore a wider variety of worldviews and choose their own without

previous constraints.

Retrospective

The retrospective property of sensemaking highlights that sense is derived when circumstances are reflected upon later as opposed to in the moment when they are happening. Retrospection is the property of sensemaking that underscores how actors objectify experiences in order to create determine appropriate next steps. While identity construction is often considered the primary lens and goal of sensemaking, retrospection

could be considered the foundational property undergirding the process.

In this study, retrospection was apparent when students indicated that they had

made sense of something related to worldview diversity before entering the focus group

setting. Sometimes their story seemed to reflect that sense was made in the moment and

the timepoints seemed concurrent, while in other instances it was clear that sense was

derived a significant amount of time later. A verbal indicator for this code was the

students' use of the past tense to convey both a circumstance and their sensemaking.

Sensemaking Stories

The student stories in this section show how students made sense of their

encounters with worldview diversity during high school or earlier in their college

experience. During the focus groups, students discussed how their previous sensemaking

then informed their interactions on campus or their perceptions of the campus worldview

climate. A specific aspect of retrospective sensemaking – that sense has been made in the

past by these student sensemakers – is showcased in these exemplar quotes.

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Kat, Southeast State. Kat's pre-college experiences informed her expectations for how interactions across worldviews would play out on campus. However, her early

experiences at Southeast State made her more cautious about discussing her worldview or

other ideological differences. She shared how she had made sense of these encounters

previously and how that sense was still guiding what she felt were reasonable next steps:

I think for me, so I was raised in... so my household was pretty split politically,

religiously, everything. So, I was always used to people would regularly question

what we were thinking and we would already have discussions so when I came to

college that is what I was expecting too. Oh, this is a place where lots of people

can come together and discuss, but I guess what changed is the way that people do

discuss certain things. Like in classes or outside of class I thought people were

going to be more respectful or certain ways. I'm not everybody but people would

fight about things, especially in a lot of my classes now I see it. I think that kind

of changed my attitude. I don't think I've become more aggressive or anything like

that, but I think I'm less quick to share my opinion sometimes, especially in

certain circles. I want to make sure I know who I'm talking to first, before I tell

them what my opinion is on certain things, so I think that probably changed my

attitude.

In this passage, Kat talked about how she previously made sense of the climate for

worldview diversity and what was acceptable on this campus, and how that previous

sensemaking was still informing her course of action.

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Kat also discussed how her formal interfaith interactions had increased this semester because she was taking a class that required participation in those events. She shared how those interactions had already been formed into sense and were guiding her actions:

I just started using the interfaith center this semester…. I really like the interfaith

center. It's such a cool, chill place to hang out and talk to people and have good

discussions cause everyone's super open here. But, one of the events that I went to

that was really cool and eye-opening for me, oh my god, it was the fair for

interfaith week, it was the last day. It was really cool, I got to meet the president

and the faculty advisor of the Baha'i club. I thought that was pretty cool because

she actually gave me some of their beads to take home, but it was kind of cool

because I got to do that practice with them, the prayer. And that was spiritually

really fulfilling for me. Especially when they explained to me that the Baha'i is

not really a religion itself, it's something that takes from different religions and is

open to everybody, and I thought that was pretty beautiful. And exploring the

different ways spirituality is used in our community. There was a yoga program

there, Yoga for Change, and that was pretty cool too because I love yoga as part

of my spirituality. It was kinda cool to see how they were using that also to reach

out to groups like they did it in prison systems and stuff like that. So, the interfaith

center has introduced so many different spiritualties to me that I think are really

great and beautiful and that I didn't know were out there until I started coming

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here and sitting in and going to events. So, I think that's really cool that they were

able to do that.

This set of stories shows a progression of how sensemaking informed future actions. Kat

made sense of her family's interactions by coming to college with an understanding that

she could have conversations across worldview difference. Then she made sense of the campus worldview climate as one that was more divisive than constructive and became more cautious about cross-worldview interactions. Her caution caused her to look for a safe and open space to have open conversations across worldviews, which lead to her choosing the interfaith center and engaging in various explorations from here. This growing chain of sensemaking reflects the property of retrospection.

Alex, Midwest University. Alex described himself as a philosophy major who was raised Catholic, then converted to Christianity, and now identifies as Agnostic. His stories of sensemaking highlight the property of retrospection because sense made in the past informs sense for a future circumstance. Alex shared a story about a high school interaction that prompted sensemaking and continued to shape his impression of the campus worldview climate:

I have a story about prior to coming to college, but it makes me wary of Jehovah's

Witness for the same reason. But they were around my house [which is close to

Midwest University] near Halloween trying to advocate against Halloween and ...

My neighbor is severely autistic and he was sitting outside and they went up and

approached him and started saying how Halloween is the devil's day and he's

worshiping the devil and I was like, "You need to leave him alone because he

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doesn't know any better and Halloween is his favorite holiday, he gets so excited

to go out and put the decorations up," and that gave me a ... I try not to think of

Jehovah's Witnesses negatively, but that experience really made me wary of them.

You represent yourself, especially when you're going out saying, "I am a

Jehovah's Witness and I am advocating for this," you're representing your whole

religion. I understand not every Jehovah's Witness, but that was like, "Whoa."

Now I found myself more wary of Jehovah's Witnesses.

This excerpt highlights how Alex's past sensemaking continued to inform his perception of the campus worldview climate and specifically people holding the worldview of a

Jehovah's Witness.

For Alex, there seemed to be a tension between holding onto impressions from previous sensemaking and a desire to change and grow by seeking new sense. He described how his worldview had changed in college by saying:

I think because of the political climate today in our college, I've been more

accepting because it has been so polarized. A lot of people are less. I feel myself

becoming more open because people are more polarized and I'm trying to

depolarize people. I'm a huge empath and a fixer. I think that, yeah, in college I've

become more so open than before.

In the same vein, Alex shared a story about a relationship he has built with a Christian pastor who runs a ministry just off campus. He shared:

I have met a pastor and we fundamentally disagree on pretty much everything….

but that's why I continue to have the relationship with them because it's not just

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we disagree on everything and that's it. We see each other as people first and then

our disagreements and it's just like ... I think that that really inspired me to keep

going with my mission to talk, to realize that we can disagree fundamentally on

everything, but we can still have this respect for each other. They still invite me

over to their campus house, knowing that I don't believe in what they believe in,

and they don't necessarily agree with everything I believe in and vice versa, and

just the fact that they welcome me so openly inspired me to keep going and try to

spread that message. When I went to the pride parade, I didn't expect to confront

protesters but another person in my group went up there and I just went, and I just

had a similar conversation that I had with the pastor except the tables were

flipped. I was trying to convince them to just spread love instead of these hateful

messages. You can spread your message but see people as people first. That

experience inspired me to keep the message going.

This story showcases how Alex's made sense of his cross-worldview interactions with the pastor, which then informed the actions he determined were reasonable during the protest. In some ways, this story highlighted a tipping point as Alex realized that the next steps informed by previous sensemaking no longer felt reasonable. As these circumstances became more pronounced, they were eventually labeled as different enough to again prompt sensemaking. Alex's relationship with the pastor was informed by sensemaking that said openness was more reasonable while simultaneously requiring new sensemaking to inform future next steps.

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Analysis: Retrospective

The retrospective property of sensemaking was often associated with instances of

cross-worldview encounters in high school or during their first year of college. Kat

described how her family's regular connections across ideological differences informed

an assumption that all people easily engage that way, but her first-year college

experiences served to undermine that assumption. Her sensemaking prompted her to be

more cautious when entering into worldview conversations, prompting her to seek a

space where interfaith engagement was normative. Kat's story continued to center her

desire to explore both her own and other worldviews as part of her developmental

experience, seemingly connected to how she made sense of her developmental trajectory

with her family before college.

Many students told stories about choosing venues for conversation and connection

that were similar to the way that Alex and Kat built upon their previous sensemaking to

decide on engaging with the pastor or the interfaith center. Alex's story showed several

direct connections between previous sensemaking and what next steps he considered

reasonable. First, he carefully engaged with the pastor guided by his previous interactions

with the Jehovah's Witness; he was forthright about his views, careful about his audience, and courteous when disagreeing. Then, when he encountered the protester, it seemed

Alex had made new sense through his interactions with the pastor that made it reasonable to engage in a conversation across their worldview differences. Though these student stories show the property of retrospection associated with ultimately positive encounters,

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other students involved in the focus groups shared about negative worldview interactions

that prompted sensemaking and continued to inform their next steps.

Creative Enactment

The sensemaking property of creative enactment reflects that communication and

action become meaningful to an organizational actor based on the environmental context.

In these stories, students ascribed a specific meaning to communications or actions

predicated on the national or campus worldview climate. Examples of this use of creative

enactment included conversations where students recognized that worldview differences

informed how reasonable a set of next steps seemed to them versus another student (e.g.,

the Muslim Ban, an invitation to a sponsored dinner). At times, students also pointed out

words or phrases that acquired a contextual meaning related to its use within the context

of the campus worldview climate or a specific cross-worldview interaction.

Sensemaking Stories

The stories in this section showcase creative enactment as students mentioned a specific communication or action to the focus group. Typically, they then verbalized how the context of the communication informed their sensemaking. These excerpts reflect that

creative enactment was closely tied to the sensemaking property of constant and ongoing,

meaning that students were recognizing how sensemaking was informed by these

instances of creative enactment as they were continuing to make sense of them during the

focus group.

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James, Southern University. James identified as an Atheist but demonstrated a

knowledge of and sensitivity to students holding religious worldviews. When asked how

his college experience had changed his worldview, James shared:

From my experience, it was compassion for different religions. Especially last

year after President Trump was elected and he was trying to implement the

different bans and travel bans and the wall and stuff. Different people from

different places in the world in my classroom were scared they would get

deported. We're all here to get an education. If their family would be deported, if

they would be able to see their family again, because if they went back overseas,

they wouldn't be able to come back. I think that the media never really depicts

different minorities as human. They kind of view them as types of animals. Like

they're beasts, in a way, so it really shows how we're all very extremely

emotional. We all care about our families and that sort, so we all can relate to

each other. … I never really had that far of a distance between me and my family.

It's kind of eye-opening how far- you hear their stories and how far they're going

to really get education. A lot of times they're not able to in their home country and

how at the end of the day we all want better of ourselves and our family members,

etc. etc. no matter where you come from, where you're going. I feel like, a lot of

times the bans, they find the smallest window or the smallest media outlook of

something bad without looking at the bigger picture.

For James, the media coverage of the ban on Muslim travel and the wall on the Mexican border was contextualized by his encounters with worldview diversity in the classroom

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setting. His sensemaking of these bans on people he knew caused him to understand

messages he received from the news media with their experiences in mind. He seemingly

understood that how their worldview differed from his would cause these mandates to

impact their lives in ways he could never have imagined. In this story, James demonstrated creative enactment by informing his sensemaking with an evaluation of these communications in light of the worldview diversity present in his classroom environment.

A different version of creative enactment was also present in James' narratives.

He raised a philosophical point about how students in his focus group were using the word "allow" in relation to worldview diversity; his implication was that the word was being incorrectly applied in the room in a way that also extended to the wider world.

Several students before him had commented on how Southern University "allowed" students to showcase their worldviews through student programming, community celebrations on campus, and ethnicity-based events. He responded:

I [agree with] them to an extent, but at the same time, all the times we use the

word "allow." So, what they're "allowed" to express such and such, but under the

Constitution, we have that right to do such a thing. A lot of times, it's like, oh,

we're allowed to do this based on our religion, but we should have that right too.

And I feel like the university should help in more inclusion, and help with more

intermingling with different religions, so we get the full college perspective and

full worldview perspective of different religions, otherwise most events here that

do do [sic] religions or ethnicities are done by those specific groups. A lot of

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times the events are only gone to by those specific groups and they're not – a lot

of times the groups don't have that great of a funding to really publicize their

events. That's why I feel like at a university, take a greater interest in publicizing

those events, so more people will come, so they will have a greater understanding

of those cultures. Because we have something downstairs and it'll be like the

Indian Association would have food and music and stuff like that. So, all you're

taking away from it is like, in India they have great food. That's it. You don't

really understand their culture or the people that are within the culture.

In this excerpt, James began making sense about what students in his group meant when they used "allow" to describe what should be a standard right in the context of the public university's campus worldview climate. He then continued to verbalize his sensemaking about the role the university should play versus his perceptions of the current status quo.

He showed creative enactment through his evaluation of how the word "allow" was used by the university and other students informed his sensemaking about the worldview climate, leading him to conclude that there are inequalities within that environment the university has a responsibility to address.

Mai, Midwest University. Mai represented herself as a student club dabbler, finding ways to keep in touch with her various interests in business, special education, and art, even though she was not officially majoring in them as part of her academic plan.

She expressed that exploring her own worldview, Protestant Christianity, was something she had dabbled with but was not a high priority or desired time investment for her college experience. However, her experiences as a student club member paired with her

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knowledge of Protestant Christian students to inform her sensemaking of how

worldview-based groups recruited student members on campus. During the focus group,

she shared about an experience with a particular group was advertising an upcoming

event:

I think at the beginning of the school year, I saw a table, I don't know if it was

interfaith, but it had something to do with a religious cause and they just gave me

a flyer, and said like, "Oh we're having this bonfire. You don't need to join or

anything, it's free." I wasn't doing anything then, but I didn't go because in the

organizations that I'm in, I know people say like, "Oh, you don't have to be a part

of this. This is for you." But ultimately, I know they are trying to form a

relationship with you, and network with you to recruit you.

Through this passage, Mai shows how she has made sense of phrases like "this is for

you" through her perceived motives of this religious group. The phrase, innocuous and

perhaps positively connotated on its own, hit her negatively when contextualized within

the campus worldview climate and her own knowledge of student organization recruitment strategies.

As she continued to speak, Mai tried make sense of her reactions to the invitation and why the invitation struck her as disingenuous and resulted in the most reasonable path forward being avoidance. She evaluated the invitation using her perceptions of how the environment of the student group space would impact her experience:

Not that I am opposed to talking about religion with different people who share

different perspectives than me, but like if I'm getting out of class I'm stressed out,

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I want to sleep, or like lay down. If I go to an event like that, I kind of, even if

there's free food, it kind of just makes me anxious 'cause I don't want to think

about that kind of stuff 'cause I feel like those are a more serious, or at least I feel

like talking about anything about spirituality and religion is pretty serious. Like if

I'm going to be stressed out, I don't want to get in that head-space. I kind of just

want to relax. So even though free food is tempting, I know like the story, that's

what they do to grow and to recruit them. So, I'm kind of like, yeah, I'm not going

to do that.

In this excerpt, Mai used her own assumptions of the student groups' intent to contextualize their invitation to a free dinner. Her evaluation of the invitation within the context of a student group tabling event demonstrated creative enactment as she brought her knowledge of student group operations and recruitment strategies into play. Her continued justification of her reasonable next steps included her perception that the invitation came with strings attached, showcasing how her sensemaking had been informed through creative enactment.

Analysis: Creative Enactment

These stories provide examples of how language or action was contextualized by the student within their campus worldview climate as part of their sensemaking process.

At Southern University, James expressed how the media coverage of President Trump's travel bans and border walls impacted him differently because "people from different places in the world in [his] classroom were scared they would get deported." His sensemaking showed creative enactment as a form of empathic understanding of the

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effect these events could have on people he knew. James also seemed to recognize that without those relationships, his sensemaking would have been limited to his own experiences which would not have included deportation or an inability to continue with his education.

Mai's story about the student group tabling showed how phrases like "this is for you" or "you don't need to join" took on the opposite meaning for her due to the context.

The creative enactment of these phrases informed her sensemaking, resulting in a reasonable but potentially inaccurate conclusion that accepting the invitation would result in stress, anxiety, and unwanted serious conversations. While the story Mai shared focused on her individual sensemaking about this student group, James' example of how the word "allow" was applied to religious practice on campus informed his sensemaking about the institution. His reflection highlighted that in the context of how students practiced their diverse worldviews on campus, "allow" was actually a weak and unconstitutional word that should not be used to describe a public institutions' support for a fundamental right. James description of reasonable next steps was that "the university should help in more inclusion, and help with more intermingling with different religions, so we [students] get the full college perspective and full worldview perspective of different religions." Both student stories showed how conventional language can be creatively enacted based on the context of usage, which then informs both individual and institutional sensemaking.

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Social

Sensemaking is a social activity where an action or communication is ascribed sense through individual thinking and social functioning. In this study, students often made sense of their encounters with worldview diversity by describing an interaction where they encountered a person of a different worldview in a setting where the social structure or expectations affected sensemaking. Some excerpts reflect instances of students' communal sensemaking of their worldview experiences where their engagement informs what paths forward seem reasonable. Student stories also showed how cross- worldview interactions in social or group contexts later impacted their sensemaking of worldview diversity or their own worldview development.

Sensemaking Stories

Excerpts in this section are exemplars of the social property of sensemaking because they showcase how their sensemaking was informed by social dynamics and the rules of social functioning. Some students made sense of their worldviews with other people or in social settings, while others made sense of their encounters with worldview diversity contextualized by social norms within a campus context. A key part of this property is the interplay between how the individual is thinking about worldview diversity and how social functioning is maintained by the reasonable next steps of the individual.

Celeste, Heartland State. Celeste described her upbringing as open to various worldviews with a requirement from her parents that she be thoughtful. When she decided to begin practicing Wicca, she said her dad just wanted to make sure she had

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done her research and thought the decision through – that she had "valid" reasoning and

was not "just doing this because it's new or different or to be rebellious or something."

Having practiced her chosen worldview for several years before enrolling at Heartland

State, she shared this story about how she approaches cross-worldview encounters as a social endeavor:

Since I feel like I have a pretty well developed from, like, my childhood and stuff,

world view I tend to focus as a person who is a member of, like, a minority

religion, cause I'm a Wiccan, I tend to focus on educating other people because,

like, I just ... It's not related to Wicca, but I was just reading Tarot cards in my

lounge and a girl came in, she started asking about them and I mentioned that I

was Wiccan and she said, "Oh, well I'm ..." I think she was Baptist, and she said,

"But I want to hear all about this. I want to know why you decided that like, when

you decided you were going to be a practicing Wiccan, why you decided that. I

want to know everything about your faith and what you believe and how you

practice and what attracted you to the religion." And that, so, I feel like that's me

sort of doing my part to break down barriers and missed perceptions and stuff that

people have about, like, other religions because I know that it's difficult to not to,

like, not have people understand. So, I feel like if I can do my part to like, make

sure that one person doesn't, like, see a pentacle and think, "Oh, automatically

Satanism." Like, that's one thing because there are, like, lots of symbols that are

used for, like, many different purposes and stuff, I guess.

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The encounter in this story is unexpected but showed how Celeste was open to helping

others make sense of her worldview communally. She suggested that by helping them

understand her perspectives and how she makes sense her own worldview, the social

functioning of the campus worldview climate would be improved.

Throughout the focus group, it was clear that Celeste was aware she ascribed to a minority worldview with few adherents on campus or in the wider community. She was open to discussion and conversation about her faith, but she expressed that she was often wary and weary of the assumptions of other students. Despite these feelings, friends who seemed truly interested in learning about Wicca were welcomed into her practice. She shared a story about an intentional cross-worldview encounter:

A few weeks ago was Mabon, which is one of our sabbats, and I did my ritual in

my room and [my friend] was like, "Do you mind if I come watch?" And I was

like, "No." So he sat in my room and I sat there and did my ritual and he had to

eat and drink the bread and the apple juice because he was in the room, but like, it

was ... You know, he watched me do my little fall harvest celebration thing and

we had a talk about it afterwards and he thought it was really cool to experience.

These stories highlight how Celeste made sense of others' interest in her worldview by

considering the increased social functioning to be gained by more people understanding

the practices and philosophies behind it. It seemed she also made sense of her own choice

to practice Wicca through conversations with other students. For Celeste, it seemed

reasonable to assume that not answering questions would encourage people to make their

own sense based on something other than her experiences (i.e. the pentacle meaning

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satanism). Consequently, she felt a responsibility to mitigate potentially detrimental

assumptions within her social circle.

Roxanne, Midwest University. Like several other focus group participants,

Roxanne experienced a significant worldview shift during her high school years. She

shared that she "had a really weird religious background" growing up, was highly

involved in a non-denominational Christian church in high school, then came out as a lesbian while transitioning to agnosticism, and now identifies as an Atheist. Over the course of the focus group, more context for these worldview identity shifts were shared with the group. However, Roxanne's story indicated that her sensemaking about worldview diversity was closely tied to how she perceived the availability of acceptance and support for her lesbian identity. She shared:

I realized that a lot of [Midwest] is very surface level in the fact that they seem

very accepting or they'll slap ... an ally sticker on something they consider it

good…. That's the surface level stuff that I've seen, especially with the different

religious groups in here. I went to the involvement fair because I was tabling for

another club I'm a part of and I was roaming around and there were a lot of

campus ministries there and just because I have a past with religion, I came in to

[Midwest] really hating Christians and that has changed throughout time here

where I don't harbor that hate towards them as much anymore. It still makes me a

little weary when I go around this [fair], but I saw all these people and they were

so wanting to talk to all these students and I was like, "That's great," but then I

hear things. I'm like the, "Well, gossip is gossip," but when you hear it over and

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over from different people who have attended these different places, that they

aren't as accepting as they seem on the surface. That's what I mean by everything

seems surface level.

Roxanne's first concern is for the social functioning among peers. Her individual thinking

about how allyship works and her experiences with Christian groups in the past that

caused her pain due to her lesbian identity are informing her sensemaking along with the potential for someone new to experience the same thing. In the next part of the story,

Roxanne shifts focus to the professor-student relationship. She shares, "You'll have teachers who go through ally training, but then treat their queer students awfully or misgender their trans students." In this statement, Roxanne is commenting on a disconnect she perceives in the campus society that is informing her experiences when she encounters other worldviews.

Based on her previous story, the focus group facilitator asked Roxanne directly how she had made sense of her difficult experiences with Christians in the past to now not harboring hate against them. She responded:

I met a couple people who identify as Christian and I don't typically keep friends

who are Christian because I'm a little weary [sic] of getting close to them, but I

did get close to them and they started to change that because I started to realize

that maybe not all Christians are like the Christians that I've come into contact in

my past. That was just meeting a couple people and getting to know them, and I

talked about that and college has given me the chance to meet people from

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different viewpoints and cultural identities and get to learn from them. That's part

of that.

Through this account, the different levels of the social property of sensemaking are evident. First, sensemaking occurred with a specific social identity lens in mind. Second, sensemaking happened when Roxanne attempted to reconcile living in a society that purports to believe one thing but acts another way. And third, making new sense occurred through social relationships with people holding different worldviews.

Cletus, Southern University. Throughout the focus group, Cletus shared pieces of a larger narrative about developing a cross-worldview friendship with a woman in his class. He introduced the story when asked about how his worldview changed during college:

I think that I've got to kind of experience some people in a new way. During my

time at high school I was mainly exposed to one religion so like, most other

religions were an alien idea to me more than anything else. I didn't know anyone

who affiliated with that religion but coming to college I've gotten the ability to

meet many people of different religions personally, had discussions with them,

see their ideas and viewpoints from them and not just hear it from somebody else

or some organization or something like that. It's given me the opportunity to

digest the idea, these are real people with real ideas that have shaped their lives,

that have shaped their families and it puts things into a better perspective about

what they believe and why they believe it.

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This excerpt showed how the presence of people holding diverse worldviews impacted

Cletus' sensemaking. At one point, he commented that he now views these students as

"real people with real ideas that have shaped their lives," suggesting that his sensemaking

had brought the experiences of diverse worldview holders from abstract to concrete.

Early in the focus group, Cletus alluded several times to the college environment allowing him to make new friends across worldviews. At one point, he mentioned that during high school he was only exposed to one religion and therefore "most other religions were an alien idea." Seeming to notice this theme in the moment, the facilitator prompted Cletus to share more about how the friendship had developed:

Yes, one of the young ladies in the class that I'm currently in, she is a Sikh-ist and

before this year I didn't know what that religion was at all and throughout this

semester I've gotten the opportunity to sit down and talk with her and really

uncover, not super deep, but at least get an idea of what that religion is and why

she follows it. Before, it was something I didn't know about and now it's

something completely new that she's been following her whole life. So, that was a

pretty cool experience to see where she comes from and how it affects her.

Cletus' sensemaking is on display through this story, showing how he is seeking to make

new sense of a worldview that represents a stark difference from his pre-college

experience. His sensemaking is informed by the inclusive and relational aspects of social

functioning in the college environment. While Cletus' disinterest in causing harm or rift

by acting against the interests of social functioning (i.e., terminating the friendship,

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asking for a new class partner) seemed genuine, it showcased how the social property of

sensemaking could cause the available and reasonable next steps to be limited.

Analysis: Social

Almost every participant described an encounter across worldview differences at some moment in their college career. While some students described encounters that were formally organized to be across worldviews, the foundational moment of most stories was one of connection that had nothing to do with worldview. For example,

Celeste's encounter while reading Tarot cards in the lounge turned into a cross-worldview encounter, and James in-class assignment to learn about what was important to the person next to him developed into an interfaith friendship. This underlying directionality caused the maintenance of social functioning to be particularly relevant for college students – most of the time, they had already invested in the friendship and their sensemaking process was skewed toward reasonable next steps that allowed that friend's worldview identity to fit into their individual thinking.

Roxanne's story highlighted how worldview identity would become relevant after the initial establishment of common ground and friendship. She mentioned that she typically avoided keeping "friends who are Christian because [she's] a little weary [sic] of getting close to them." However, she became friends with these Christian students, which then prompted her to make sense of her own individual thinking in light of her desire to continue the social functioning of the friendship. Additionally, examining how the worldviews of her peers made sense within their friendship caused Roxanne to examine her own worldview.

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As suggested by these examples, student stories about causal, unstructured worldview engagement typically had positive connotations. Many of the stories associated with sensemaking through social relationships highlighted growth in knowledge of other worldviews, like James learning about Sikhism and Celeste sharing the seasonal Mabon ritual with her friend. Students also described gaining a greater knowledge of specific worldview practices or increasing their ability to connect across worldview differences. Like Roxanne, students were often primed to learn from their friends because the existing connection encouraged them to find reasonable next steps that included maintaining the friends. While these exemplar participants discussed cross- worldview relationships with a specific student of another worldview, many spoke broadly of social encounters across worldviews as part of their experience in both curricular and co-curricular spaces.

Constant and Ongoing

Sensemaking is constant and ongoing which means that the salience of circumstances that were noticed and bracketed may be assigned at the time of remembrance rather than when it occurred. In this study, students often assigned new salience to their previous experiences as they responded to a specific prompt from the facilitator. For example, students explained their perception of the campus worldview climate but it was clear that they were actively making sense of previous experiences in that moment to answer the questions. Students also demonstrated the property of constant and ongoing when they had a quick reaction to another student's response and then verbalized their sensemaking as they re-labeled previous experiences as different.

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Sensemaking Stories

These sensemaking stories are exemplars of the constant and ongoing property because they showcase how students assigned salience to past events that affected how they made sense of those events in the moment of reflection. Students often reflected this property when they reasoned through previously noticed behaviors like how institutional support was allocated or why a certain response to worldview diversity manifested. Many of these excerpts began with, "I feel," or, "thinking about it now," a verbal cue that indicated they were actively making sense during the focus group by assigning salience to previous events.

Nicole, West University. Nicole identified as a Christian woman who perceived her institution as very secular. When asked to describe the worldview climate of campus, she shared:

I think that the perceived climate is very atheist, nonreligious, non-spiritual. What

a lot of religions would say is secular and just a very in this world sort of a

worldview. I think that there actually are pretty substantial communities of people

who have strong or moderately strong religious beliefs that affect their worldview.

But I feel like they're really like sub-communities and sort of on the down low.

Like they find each other and that's ... then they're good. And they just go to their

places with their people. And yeah, so I think that there is diversity but it doesn't

necessarily feel very open.

In this passage, Nicole is considering previously noted facets of the campus environment

(e.g., large worldview-based student groups, little overt acknowledgement of worldview)

153 and assigning new, descriptive salience to them as she engages in sensemaking. When prompted to describe factors that contributed to her perceptions, her language contained more verbal cues of the constant and ongoing property. These included phrases such as,

"I think," or broad generalizations like, "a lot of people," instead of more specific remembered examples.

West University seemed to be a liberal campus where there was an underlying assumption that most people ascribed to a nonreligious worldview, with several students commenting that the campus climate was not very welcoming of religion in general or

Christianity in particular. In this context, understanding Nicole's perceptions of the climate as someone holding a Christian worldview seemed particularly interesting to the focus group facilitator. When prompted, Nicole continued to describe her perceptions, saying:

I think that professors as well as students come in with this idea that… it's the

West Coast, a lot of people are from California and everyone is just kind of like

here to do college. And a lot of people are embracing that college atmosphere

which leaves a lot of ... it leaves kind of a lot of worldview behind like whatever

you brought from your parents, I think college kind of strips a lot of that way.

And you see that with people who try new things whether that's classes, drugs,

whatever. And people are sort of forming their own worldviews and informing

new worldviews. I think people kind of start with more of a blank slate which is

easily that like this is the world and that's all there is and all I have to worry about

is now and me. Which might just be a maturity thing because everyone is like 18

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and stupid. I think that's part of it. I think that's the main one I would say. And

then again, just like, the professors sort of reinforce this idea that everyone's on

the same page, everyone's sort of just like, “Oh this is the page we're on.”

Nicole's experiences over time of how others are contributing to the broader campus worldview climate are showcased here as salient informants to her own sensemaking.

Sarah, Southeast State. Sarah was an involved Muslim student at Southeast

State. Throughout the focus group, she described several experiences that indicated she was involved and perhaps worked for the spiritual life center. However, it was ambiguous, and the focus group facilitator prompted her to explain her roles more fully.

Sarah started her response with a brief history of the interfaith center and its evolution over her time at Southeast State:

I feel like I have to preface it and give you a little bit of history to explain that

question because it was a little bit taking apart. Originally last year it was my first

year here. I was a freshman and so the organizations, Muslim student association,

is a student funded club, so we kind of built it back up. It's like an option, like it's

had a history, but for some reason it started dying down. When I got here, I was

like, you know, I want to like boost it back up. I'm Muslim, there's so many

Muslims on campus, why is it not a thing? Originally in this space, this area, there

were a bunch of cubicles in the back and there's a lounge in the front and the

cubicles are for, you know, since this is the interfaith center, where originally at it

housed the Muslim student organization, the Jewish student union, Black student

union… Asian students in alliance and then Latin student organization, and we all

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kind of had our space in the back. We worked here but the Latin American

student organization, Black Student Union, ASIA and the Jewish student union

were all funded by the university. The Muslim student organization was not, so

they all technically worked for [Southeast State] and worked there. For the

Muslim student association, we just had a cubicle there, where we were allowed

to keep like things that we had bought for like events and stuff like that, and we

had like a storage closet where we could share with other students like where we

put stuff for events. We technically did not work here, we just kind of were

housed here.

This story started with the words, "I feel," indicating that Sarah was both making sense of

her previous experiences in the moment and recognizing that the history might be required for others in the room to make sense of her perceptions.

The history she shared grounded her sensemaking and highlighted to the group what she had noticed, bracketed, and labeled throughout her experiences as a student leader of the Muslim student organization. She verbalized her sensemaking by describing the salience she assigned to these previous experiences:

Now they're doing some reconstruction and all of the faith-based organizations

like don't have offices anymore. I don't have an office, the Muslim Student

Association doesn't have a cubicle or an office here anymore. The Jewish student

union does not have an office here any longer. …I do feel like it is a little bit

systematic in the way that there is some, what is it called, not prejudice, but like

disadvantages for religious groups on campus, because even within the interfaith

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center, you know, it's supposed to be interfaith, but a lot of the faith based

organizations have less privileges than other organizations. For instance, all of the

organizations were given keys to the lounge and they were able to hold events

there and the interfaith center would fund things- Muslim student association was

not, we weren't allowed to be here past 5:00pm, unless we wanted to come pray

because we do have an evening prayer, so the doors would be locked and

someone would have to come open the door, let us go pray and then let us out and

locked the door behind us. We didn't have access to the offices if no one was back

there already, so we weren't allowed to be back there by ourselves kind of thing.

If we ever wanted to host an event and after 5:00pm, because that's when the

lounge closes, we have to have someone who has access to the lounge participate

in our event or attend it and let us back into the lounge to bring things back. I do

feel like it is a little, there's some systematic, not discretion… Maybe a lack of

support, but there's like some systematic kind of disadvantages for us, because

there were certain rules put in place that I feel like weren't specifically targeting

us, but they're definitely disadvantaging us as a faith-based organization.

Sarah's conclusion that there is systematic disadvantage toward religious groups at

Southeast State resulted from what she now viewed as the most reasonable explanation for her previous experiences. These conclusions showcased the constant and ongoing

language indicators – that she had not made sense of these actions in this away already, but instead had just made sense in during the focus group by assigning salience to the actions affecting the interfaith center, funding, space access, and employment in the past.

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Analysis: Constant and Ongoing

The sensemaking property of constant and ongoing was difficult to capture

because assigning new salience to past events is rarely verbalized. The focus groups

provided a unique opportunity because the facilitator and other students offered challenge

and support for students to verbalize their sensemaking process. In this format, students

were able to share these impressions and conclusions as one response chain. Importantly,

the likelihood that the constant and ongoing property of sensemaking was engaged but

not verbalized is fairly high.

These student stories highlighted how what was noticed in the past is still being

noticed in the presence, labeled as relevant, and informing the student's sensemaking.

When prompted to comment on the worldview climate at West University, she reflected

on her knowledge that there were large worldview-based groups that seemed to thrive on campus and assigned new salience to those as part of the worldview climate. She then continued to make sense of a perceived disconnect between her impression of a secular and nonreligious worldview environment with these thriving groups, saying that she feels

"like they're really like sub-communities and sort of on the down low." Similar to Nicole, students throughout the focus groups discussed how the campus worldview climate of their institution was secular and associated the perpetuation of that climate to the faculty members.

Sarah's story highlighted her sensemaking about the lack of institutional support for worldview-related student groups and personal worldview exploration. The constant and ongoing property was often associated with a critique of the institution, likely why it

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was associated with "I feel" or "I think" statements from the students. Sarah's concluding

thought, that she felt like her institution's rules were not targeting the MSA but were

"definitely disadvantaging [it] as a faith-based organization," seemed to be a bold, new declaration that became a reasonable conclusion during the focus group.

Extracted Cues

Throughout the focus groups, students often identified specific communications

or actions on campus that impacted their sensemaking about worldview diversity. While

these extracted cues provided information that helped the participants reduce ambiguity

and move forward through an encounter with worldview diversity, the cues could

positively or negatively affect the students' perceptions of the campus worldview climate.

There were several students who described cross-worldview interactions via structured

interfaith engagement that communicated new information causing sensemaking.

Other students noticed and bracketed either the secular norms or Christian

privilege through a specific experience on campus (e.g., exams scheduled on holidays,

abnormality of religion) that prompted sensemaking. In some instances, students labeled

the experience as different from the perceived institutional worldview; in others, the

labeled difference concerned the available resources or support for certain worldview

groups on campus. Consistent with the coding agenda, the sensemaking stories shared in

this section showcase clear instances where the actions or communications noticed by an

individual then impacted on their sensemaking.

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Sensemaking Stories

This section highlights exemplar stories that reflected the sensemaking property of extracted cues. In these excerpts, the students shared how they used a specific communication or action as part of the sensemaking process. Importantly, the property of extracted cues is highly individual, so these quotes focus on a specific cue used by the student to make sense of ambiguous circumstances.

John, Heartland State. John identified as a Muslim international student from

Pakistan. His only on-campus experience was at Heartland State and he seemed to be surprised by how welcoming he found the campus worldview climate despite experiencing some hostility. He described his experience, saying:

When I came for the first time, I told you, my background was very narrow, and I

had no interaction with any person with a different perspective, religious life, and

culture wise, or ideologically, also because there is a whole shift when you travel

from all the way around the world. I'm from Pakistan. … When I came here, the

first two experiences with someone was not good in a way that there were certain

things that they said because of the faith I belong to. I'm a Muslim, and you know

the situation a year before at the same time with the elections were held and there

was a lot going on on social media. I don't feel bad about those people because

their perspective was bad. The way they were exposed to different certain things

like media, stuff like that. I remember how intolerant I was because for the first

time, when somebody said, "Oh, are you from ISIS?" and I was like, "Oh! No. No

no." I didn't even know how to respond positively or constructively.

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John's immediate sensemaking of this situation was that it was not good but that a few

people with poor perspectives informed mostly by social media were not going to affect

his experience. At the beginning of this quote, John grounds his sensemaking in his own

identity construction as someone from a narrow background who made a massive

geographic shift, but then alludes to how within that narrow background he had made

assumptions based on media and social media outlets. When John has a negative worldview encounter on Heartland's campus, he makes sense of why someone would ask,

"'Oh, are you from ISIS?'" by extracting probable cues from the media and social media available in the United States about Muslims from Pakistan.

John went on to discuss the formal forums he used to gain knowledge that would help him continue to make sense of the campus worldview environment. He shared:

By the time it was my second semester, I took “Religions to the World.” Then,

that was my time when I got to learn the ... I knew the Christianity and Judaism is

an Abrahamic faith and they are closely related to Islam, but how much close and

what way it was, I wasn't sure of it. After that class I got to know that. And I got

to know much about even Islam. And a worldview perspective of Islam rather

than just a view of Islam from being a Muslim. So that was really a positive thing

that happened to me.

Additionally, John explained that he was part of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) on campus and had many positive cross-worldview experiences in that context. It was clear he placed much more weight on the cues he received through his classes and student groups, using those to make sense of the environment rather than the earlier, negative

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experiences. He showcased his own sensemaking through a story about a regular MSA

event:

Part of that is having Quran studies every other Tuesday. Not just having a

conversation about Quran among the Muslims. We always have every other

meeting either a Christian or a Jew or someone else visit us in our meeting. And

then at one time I had on a panel where there were all Christian and Jews asking

questions about the Islam that they were not sure. … Whenever I was answering

questions or they were telling me something, it was a very healthy conversation

that we had. Those experiences were really good. And [another time] I actually

went to the churches with my friend and my host family, and we enjoyed a lot.

[And then] even for when we had Ramadan, those people went with us to the

mosque, and we had our dinner together that we used to have in the Ramadan.

That's a very special one.

For John, the positive and personal interactions outweighed the negative ones in terms of

his sensemaking. Essentially, he extracted more cues from the positive experiences than

the negative ones when making sense of his encounters with worldview difference.

Ita, Southeast State. Ita identifies as a Jewish woman currently attending college

in the predominantly Christian area around Southeast State. She shared with the focus

group that she had come to college from a much more diverse and heavily Jewish area

and had noticed that the salience of her worldview identity had risen while in college.

Additionally, she noted that her experiences indicated an unstated expectation that

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everyone in this new environment possessed a basic knowledge of Christianity. She

described several of these knowledge expectations:

I have realized how much I don't understand Christianity, just things that people

assume other people know. People say, "I grew up in the church," all the time and

I have no idea what that means. I asked, every single person had a different

explanation, which I pretty much expected, but I'm like okay. My mom taught at

my temple, my best friend's Mom taught at temple, so I was there two or three

days a week. I graduated from Hebrew school and I'm, like, so we go to church

once a week and everything's based on your church, and I'm just like, where you

only go Christmas and Easter, like are those your only holidays? Do you not have

enough holidays? Or like, someone was trying to explain what sacrament was to

me and I'm just like, what, this sounds like ritual cannibalism. I was very

confused and I'm just ... These are just things people assume they understand like,

"Oh, Ash Wednesday." I'm like, what is Ash Wednesday?

Ita expressed that not only was there an expectation that she understands various pieces of Christian ideology, but she also encountered circumstances that made her feel the effects of Christian privilege. She shared:

I had two exams scheduled on the holiest day of the [Jewish] year, and one of

them was in “Sociology of Religion.” You think teachers teaching class about

religion would know, the holiest day of the year for a not insignificant number of

people who go into higher education, would not be in class and yet they schedule

on this day.

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The cues Ita extracted from how people casually communicated using Christian

terminology and acted about holidays that fell outside a Christian timeline informed her

sensemaking of the campus worldview climate.

In addition to extracting cues from indirect communications and actions, Ita

directly experienced negative cross-worldview actions and communications in informal spaces that impacted her sensemaking. As part of her experience of the campus

worldview climate, she mentioned that Southeast State was "a very normative campus

and ranging from meh, to at times violently hostile, to any sort of variation." When asked

to talk more about her experiences by the focus group facilitator, she responded:

I've been followed, I've been shouted at. … For being Jewish, and I'm not the only

one. I found swastikas on campus, I've had people shout things at me, I've had

people change their behavior to do specific things to offend me. I'm like, do really

mean ... I've had people do things that they would never do otherwise because

they know a Jew was present, and they will make jokes and do really anti-Semitic

things just because they know I'm there.

These various communications and actions caused Ita to make sense of the campus worldview climate as negative, especially toward her own Jewish worldview. Clearly, she labeled the Christian leaning in her new environment as different from her pre-college experience and was prioritizing cues that helped her make sense of these circumstances.

As she continued to have negative cross-worldview interactions, it reinforced to her that the climate was unsupportive and unwelcoming of diverse worldviews.

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John, West University. John identified as an Atheist coming into college and has

maintained and deepened his commitment to that worldview during his time at West

University. As a philosophy major, he noted that his required coursework was helpful for being open to other viewpoints by creating ambiguity on purpose. He described his experience:

I really benefited from all the different philosophy classes. You repeatedly see

different systems and world views built up, and torn down, and built up, and torn

down. It gives you more of this uncertainty, not only with yourself, but with all

different possible perspectives, and the possible validity, or almost a kind of

relativism opens up. It's just made me more considerate in hearing ... Not that I

was mean or anything before, but more willing to hear things out and suspend

disbelief.

In this excerpt, John highlights how he is extracting cues through his formal classroom

environment that indicate a posture of openness is appropriate for worldview

conversations. These cues then inform his sensemaking as he encounters other students who hold diverse worldviews. For example, John shared that he had previously held an elitist viewpoint as an Atheist toward those who held some form of religious belief that he was happy to shed:

I've shed the dismissive, "Oh, it's nonsense," that kind of more smug perspective.

Thank goodness. Just, I think it's just made me generally more open to any

general perspectives. And not that I'm not necessarily going to just be inclined to

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suddenly believe them or anything like that, but there's a ... The empathy involved

in considering and seeing from the other perspective has opened up immensely.

Part of John's story was that he grew up in an Atheist family and had little exposure to

students holding other worldviews before college. The cues he extracts from the

classroom environment and his personal connections across worldviews seem to result in

his approaching encounters with worldview diversity using empathy instead of derision

or condescension.

One story showcased how John extracted cues from the experiences of students

holding different worldviews than himself and made sense of them through an empathic

lens. He shared the following about a student who lived in his first-year residence hall:

Last year in the building I lived in, it was actually really interesting because the

majority of the hall I was in was not religious, and there was one religious person

in the corner. It was sort of like, "Oh, we have a Christian," which was a very

strange experience. I've been used to the opposite normally being the case. At

times, it worried me that it could almost turn into a ... If they're the minority, then

you could view it negatively and not be as considerate. I do worry that there's a bit

of that on occasion, but I don't think it's the predominant thing. I don't know.

The actions of his fellow students in this story became extracted cues to John that informed his sensemaking. Empathy is highlighted as a mechanism as he paused and considered how the Christian student was experiencing the situation as the object of the floor's semi-negative attention. This excerpt is one example of how John showed concern

166 about West's worldview climate tending to favor secular and liberal students, though he was still in the process of extracting cues to make sense of this impression.

Analysis: Extracted Cues

Students extracted cues from action and communication both directed to them and indirectly observed by them. At Heartland State, John's story highlighted how communication about worldview diversity on campus was not limited by location and happened in the classroom, student group settings, and casual conversations. In his case, pursuing greater personal knowledge of his own Muslim worldview was what most frequently brought him in contact with worldview diversity. The cues he extracted from one setting helped him make sense of his experiences in another setting. For example, his

Religions of the World class helped him gain "a worldview perspective of Islam rather than just a view of Islam from being a Muslim," which in turn helped him make sense of future conversations across worldview difference. This pattern was reflected throughout the focus group data, where students would extract cues from their coursework or a conversation with a friend and use them to make sense of a later encounter.

Many students shared experiences like Ita's where Christianity was observed as normative, a conclusion informed by cues extracted from the communications and actions within the campus environment. Sensemaking about a larger construct like the campus worldview identity seemed to flow from compounded instances where students extracted similar cues over time, like Ita first noticing the prevalence of Christian lingo, then encountering a course calendar conflict with a Jewish holiday, and finally direct negative encounters based on her Jewish heritage. Stories of Christian normativity across the focus

167 groups usually highlighted the impact on the students' personal worldview expression or identity but typically did not include any elements of empathy or acknowledgement of larger narrative. Notably, every set of participants mentioned the topic of normative

Christianity except the students at Midwest University. These students referenced perceptions of Christian normativity being true of their home towns but did not verbalize it as present on their campus or the surrounding area.

While some extracted cues pointed to Christian privilege, students also noticed that secular and liberal viewpoints were more readily accepted on campus. These cues were less often codified into something like a syllabus and more often seen through the actions of faculty, staff, or students. John's story about the Christian student on his residence hall floor highlights how a student holding the generally majoritized Christian worldview might experience marginalization or othering on a college campus.

Interestingly, students like John who ascribed to a nonreligious worldview were more likely to express empathy for the potentially difficult experiences of Christian students than students holding minority worldviews. It is likely that a student like Ita at Southeast

State may not extract the same cues about a Christian student as John at West University.

This difference highlights how the property of extracted cues is predicated on and through the identity construction process of the sensemaker, meaning that only actions or communications that are noticed can then inform their sensemaking.

Plausibility

The sensemaking category of plausibility is concerned with the organizational actor’s goal to determine reasonable next steps rather than a complete and accurate

168 understanding of events. Student participants often shared their perceptions about why an interaction happened based on what next steps were taken and why they seemed reasonable. These interactions could be between any two parties on campus but were often related to a power differential that seemed to affect how a faculty, staff, administrator, or campus policy impacted a students' experience.

The property of plausibility was also exhibited when students verbally reconciled a set of actions into a framework they already understood. Essentially, they noticed and bracketed the circumstance and forced it back into a format that could be labeled as

"same" and thus not prompt sensemaking. Students essentially curtailed the need for sensemaking by finding a plausible if inaccurate story that explained how an encounter with worldview diversity unfolded.

Sensemaking Stories

These sensemaking stories are exemplars of plausibility because they showcase how students framed their explanations and next steps without pursuing an accurate or comprehensive understanding of the events. Some excerpts highlight the assumptions the students use to inform their sensemaking while others display the students' interpretations of how a specific event occurred. At times, students engaging the property of plausibility would propose potential solutions that would help alleviate the issue, though they clearly did not have all the information to make these recommendations.

Joseph, Southern University. Unlike others in his focus group, the worldview climate of Southern University seemed to align with Joseph's expectations as someone from the same area. However, an important difference was the campus community

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included many people holding other worldviews, which he suggested was an important

factor in his own worldview development. Early in the focus group, he shared:

College has given me the opportunity to have a more positive affect on my

worldview, because instead of people feeding me information about other people,

I can go to those people and understand their complexities and what makes us

diverse and learn how to interact with others. … [The classroom has been is a

place where this happens,] because we all know how the media likes to portray

people in Muslim community when most of my classes, that's a good majority of

the people in the classroom, so I had a chance to talk with them and understand

what they do and understand that the media can basically push a lie about a

certain group.

In this case, Joseph pointed out the power of the media and his perception of its ability to further lies about certain groups. While this may not be an entirely accurate understanding of events, it is plausible and helped him make sense of the differences he

noted between the media's portrayal of Muslims and his experiences with the Muslim

students he encountered in his classes.

Joseph was later prompted by the facilitator to share his perceptions about why

the IDEALS data showed students at Southern University were less inclined to respect or

appreciate people who held different worldviews than their own. Joseph's search for

reasonable next steps illuminated his belief that neither the campus worldview climate nor the wider campus community inspired or promoted extending goodwill beyond your own worldview group. He verbalized how this was the most plausible explanation:

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I would say that [our city's] religious climate is still very segregated. You just take

a ride, maybe five, ten miles out. Baptist church, Baptist church, Baptist church,

Christian church, Christian church, Christian church, Christian church, next to a

Catholic church. That's all that I see. Because of where we are, those views have

never really been challenged… Things like other religious symbols, we don't have

those down here, because of the people that live here. They don't have to quote-

unquote, give it up, give up the control they have over the area. And that can

easily be transferred to Catholics, because a lot of the higher up administration

people, they've been here a very long time, and they still have the same views as

when [Southern University] was a smaller school, and they haven't been

accustomed to the growth of the school and what the school looks like now as

proposed to what it looked like then. Because [South] is still a relatively young

school. If you have those same people, then they'll never really grow in luster as a

university. They'll grow in numbers but not anything else.

Joseph made sense of why the campus worldview climate was not noticeably different than the surrounding area by aligning the viewpoints of the administration consistently with the region surrounding the institution. While the explanation required a broad and not necessarily accurate generalization, the inherent plausibility offered Joseph a reasonable explanation.

Dillon, Heartland State. Dillon identified as an Atheist student who was very involved in worldview-related student groups on campus. His stories highlighted the property of plausibility when he reconciled circumstances he had labeled as potentially

171 different back into a recognizable framework. For example, he shared the following about his own experience coming into the college environment:

Coming to campus being an Atheist, I mean, it wasn't too difficult to kind of get

connected. A lot of millennial college kids probably go down the same road of

kind of doubting god or doubting whatever belief that they come in, so being

secular was not too difficult to get into. And …it was pretty easy to connect with

other people and other organizations that shared the same mindset.

As someone who grew up identifying staunchly Christian and experiencing a shift in worldview during high school, part of Dillon's sensemaking here likened his experiences to other "millennial college kids." He used the word "probably" to describe his perception that his own worldview experiences during college were normative. While Dillon's pre- determined narrative may not be accurate, it is plausible that because getting connected as an Atheist millennial was easy for him it could be easy for others.

An example of the property of plausibility was again prompted by a focus group facilitator sharing IDEALS data. Dillon was asked to consider why Heartland State students reported less interfaith interactions than the national average. His first response concerned what would be plausible based on his own intersecting social identities:

…if you're thinking of going towards a different belief than all your friends do,

you feel less comfortable doing it because you feel judgment from some. And so,

assumingly, like, for me as an example, I come ... All my friends are pretty much

Christian and so, coming to school here, like, it was kind of hard to, you know,

come out as bisexual. Or you know, come out and be a very vocal Atheist because

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I'm like, in the back of my head I'm like, "Okay, they're judging me." Because

they know what I was like before.

He then broadened the narrative to the nature of Midwesterners and how that plays into cross-worldview interactions. By situating himself and his friends as Midwesterners, he allowed the following plausible story to supersede the more accurate and personal reasons that these encounters might be difficult:

I think it's just kind of a comfort zone and it might go back to the Midwestern

thing, is that people just don't know how to approach that. And it also goes with

trying to approach it without sounding bad. … And so, it's kind of just difficult

because people are very conscious of how to be nice, and so they're really ... It's

difficult to go up to somebody and assume that they're a different belief and then

take that assumption and ask them, like, "Do you believe this? Can I talk to you?"

Because they feel like that itself might cross the line, too. And so, I think, going

back to the Midwestern thing, people are to themselves. They don't like conflict

and so they don't want to open up that door because they feel that might be a

burden.

Plausibility dictated that the pre-existing narrative offered a reasonable path forward that allowed Dillon to make sense of their circumstances more quickly. While the events or rationales may not be accurate, such as this case where a more nuanced explanation would have included both the personal and stereotypical narratives, plausible explanations tend to offer quicker and more direct sensemaking pathways.

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Analysis: Plausibility

The various assumptions student sensemakers held about themselves, their

institutions, or the worldview climate in their area often highlighted how the property of

plausibility was used to inform student sensemaking. These assumptions offered pre-

existing narratives that offered a quick if inaccurate way to make sense of their observations. Joseph's assumptions about the administrators at his institution and Dillon's assumptions about his friends were both predicated on regionally-accepted narrative

descriptions. While Dillon's sensemaking began with a more personal and nuanced

explanation for his own actions, he ultimately reconciled his decisions into a more impersonal but easier narrative. Many of these statements followed a specific prompt from the focus group facilitator asking students to make sense of or explain their perceptions.

Like Dillon and Joseph, other students also interpreted why an individual or an institution proceeded through an encounter with worldview diversity in a specific way

using pre-existing plausible narratives. Joseph's contention that his campus worldview

experiences helped him "understand that the media can basically push a lie about a

certain group" offered an abstract scapegoat to blame for his own misconceptions. Dillon

also used the abstract concept of generational similarity to undergird his divergence from

his pre-college experiences. His comment that "a lot of millennial college kids probably

go down the same road of kind of doubting God or doubting whatever belief" they

previously held highlighted the broader, less precise narrative that informed his

sensemaking. Plausibility as a primary sensemaking property resulted in students creating

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reasonable paths forward based on assumptions or pre-existing narratives and focused on moving forward quickly as opposed to pursuing a complete understanding of the perspectives, complexities, or motivations at play.

The next section presents findings that show how student sensemaking was influenced by the macro-context of the public institutions. To review, the macro-context is comprised of three contexts: formative, structural, and discursive. In critical sensemaking, the individual sensemaker searches for reasonable next steps by employing the seven properties of sensemaking. For this study, I conceptualized the student sensemaker situated within an institution situated within its macro-context. The following sections highlight student stories that show how their sensemaking was influenced by each component of the macro-context in turn.

Formative Context

The formative context of institutions reflects how they are situated within the higher education industry, the local and regional communities surrounding their campus, and the national landscape. Formative contexts link dominant social values to individual action through sensemaking. In this way, the institution and all its organizational actors engage in a co-construction process that informs the formative context while simultaneously the formative context informs how norms and values are actualized within an institution. Student stories often reflected the formative context when they discussed the higher education industry broadly or specific normative behaviors of their institutions that influenced their sensemaking.

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Sensemaking Stories

This section shares sensemaking stories that showcase how the students'

reasonable next steps were influenced by the formative context of the institution. Some

excerpts show the ways that students' decision-making was linked to the dominant social

values of their institution, region, or the higher education industry. These stories highlight

how the influence of the formative context can limit the perceived options available if sensemakers want to maintain a sense of normalcy in their environments.

Seymour, West University. Seymour identified as an Agnostic who grew up in the Church of Latter-Day Saints in Utah. Throughout the focus group, he expressed that while he was no longer part of that organization nor held a strong alternate religious belief, he had empathy for those who did. Several of his comments concerned how the

campus worldview climate at West University was situated within a very liberal and

nonreligious part of the West Coast. In recognizing the situatedness of campus, he noted

some ways it affected the actions and options of his fellow students:

If I can add to that, I kind of see what you mean [about there being a pejorative

connotation to being Christian]. It's not outright volatile, and it's not very mean,

but living in other parts of the United States, the majority is usually Christianity,

and here it's kind of the opposite. It's like Christianity here is more of a minority,

and once you see someone who's Christian, it's unspoken, but everybody kind of

knows that person is really Christian. I've heard people say that they've been

mocked for being Christian here or made fun of, but I've never seen it, but I'm not

going to invalidate that at all. But yeah, I definitely see what you mean. It's just

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kind of weird. It's just like this pack mentality of just, "Oh, yeah, they're

Christian." It's weird. It's strange.

Seymour's sensemaking of the stories he's heard about Christian students on campus show how he was influenced by his understanding of the dominant values of the region and how they are linked to individuals' actions on campus. His own experience with

Christianity as the dominant worldview in other parts of the country offered him a

comparison point not shared by others in this focus group. This knowledge exacerbated

his felt ambiguity as he recognized the influence of the formative context at West

University was different than his experience elsewhere.

Later in the focus group, Seymour shared a more specific example of how the

formative context influenced his sensemaking:

My friend was telling me about how they were in a world's religion class and they

were learning about the persecutions and persecuting of other religions. The topic

reached Christianity. This person feels very strongly about their faith and they

expressed that they ... They expressed good things about their Christianity, but

then by the professor, was kind of put-down. I can't put it the best I can, but it was

more of like a ... Especially on this campus because you were saying it's kind of

flipped. It's not so much that people hate Christianity here, it's more of that people

are becoming more aware of the ... There are a lot of ... Ugh, I'm trying to put this

in perspective the right way. It's… people learn a lot about the bad things

Christianity has done, and not so much about the ... It's a very skewed perspective

here. The professors here definitely lean that way [about Christianity], whether or

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not you want them or believe that they should. People have been laughed at by

their professors in class. That's what happened to this person is they brought up

their religion and they were kind of the butt of a joke in the class and had to sit

down. That kind of thing.

In this story, the formative context of secular normativity in higher education and the geographic area is influencing how Seymour is making sense of his friend's specific

experience and the campus worldview climate. His sensemaking process is on display in

this excerpt, as he recognized the influence of the formative context as problematic in

conjunction with the constructed identities of the campus, the faculty, and various

students for different reasons. Finding a reasonable explanation for these differences was

especially difficult because of his desire to empathize with his Christian friend, whose

individual actions seemed constrained by the dominant social values of the institution.

Trenton, Heartland State. Trenton's experience at Heartland State was that the

college environment had more diversity than the surrounding geographic area, but was

still largely comprised of people from rural, Midwestern small towns. While others in his focus group interpreted the formative context as very Christian-oriented, to the point where Heartland State's campus could seem Christian, Trenton's sensemaking did not lead him to the same conclusion. For him, the formative context influenced who was present on campus, and then who was present determined the level of Christian activity.

He shared:

I would say that [being unsatisfied with the level of diversity on campus] speaks

more volumes to the area we're in. From the Midwest, a lot of people are from

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small towns, we're just... [This state] in general, it's like 95% of students here are

from [here]. I feel like that plays a huge role into it. And I think it's just more,

again, people ... like what James was saying, he felt like it was overbearing when

it came to seeing all these posters [for Christian student groups], or all these

different religious workshops. It's just that people are really passionate about that.

But, again, they're not going to be ... not trying to force it down people's throats,

and saying, "You're wrong for thinking differently." It's just people are trying

super hard to recruit, almost, people to come in their organizations. So, I feel

that's why people think, "Oh my god. This is so much. They keep on trying, and

trying, and trying." But it's not ... I wouldn't say it's to the point where it's like,

"Oh, you and I must just be an extremely Christian campus." No, there's just a

student organization trying their best to get people involved in it. That's kind of

how I would see it.

Trenton's reasonable path forward was heavily influenced by his perception of the situated location of the institution. While other students viewed the lack of worldview diversity as something for the institution to address, Trenton made sense of the greater visibility of Christian groups as a reasonable by-product of the formative context.

Later in the focus group, Trenton shared why he perceived students were less likely to engage in cross-worldview interactions at Heartland State. For him, the physical location of the institution and the type of student it attracted informed what he found reasonable:

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It doesn't really surprise me because, again, where our school is located. Like I said, 90% of people are from [around here] … the Midwest in general is extremely, extremely white oriented I'll say.… I would say the university tries their best to promote diversity. We have a center for multicultural education, we have diversity officers, or presidents at that first year…. I would say the university does a good job promoting them, it's just the university can only promote so much, and then it's up to the students to engage with that. And I feel like there might be a little disconnect there. And especially with first year. First year respondents, if they were freshmen, then they probably aren't comfortable with that. I've definitely grown from freshman to senior year when it comes to dealing with any sort of diversity. Whether it's faith based, or ethnicity based, or whatever it may be. It's not that I wasn't uncomfortable, I just ... As Rose said, she'd never saw someone wearing a hijab. I saw that maybe two times ever in my life, and that's because I was out of the country. It wasn't even in the state…. I think that's where also some people might be a little bias, I guess, because they just really haven't experienced it a whole lot yet. So, they're just uncomfortable with it. I don't think. I personally haven't seen anybody. There's been a few instances, where I've seen blatant racism, but it's more people are just straight up don't know. And I don't want to say they're ignorant to it, but they're just are stuck in their little bubble that I talked about earlier, and they have never experienced anything outside of their town or city.

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In this example, Trenton has noticed and bracketed these circumstances and the influence

of the formative context supports his label as "same" and therefore not in need of sensemaking. This passage shows how he has quickly made sense of the IDEALS data

presented by the focus group facilitator and began sensemaking to understand why the

data did not reflect his experiences.

Analysis: Formative Context

These student stories highlighted how the formative context influences

sensemaking. Trenton's reasonable explanations clearly interpreted the influence of the

formative context as the most natural and reasonable outcome. He concluded that the

university is doing its best to provide a diverse environment for students and perhaps the

more pressing problem is that students are not taking responsibility for their own

decisions not to engage across difference. In this story, the sensemaking properties of

plausibility and constant and ongoing are also showcased, underscoring how the

formative context is an influence that permeates the sensemaking process. Interestingly,

Trenton's conclusions were not shared among the other students in his focus group, who

consistently conveyed a lack of institutional support for non-Christian perspectives. Their

reasonable path forward remained focused on the institution and its responsibility to push

back against the dominant social values in the formative context in order to provide the

best college experience for students.

Seymour's stories highlighted that as part of evaluating the reasonableness of

certain next steps, students might have felt it was wise to be cautious during cross-

worldview encounters. His experiences at West University seemed to indicate that

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students holding Christian worldviews most often felt the need to guard their

communications or actions. His sensemaking in this area seemed stalled because the

formative context of West University was very different than other formative contexts he

had experienced, such as his upbringing in Utah. His hesitation to commit to one path as

the most reasonable was supported by data from the other focus groups. These revealed that on other campuses, notably Heartland State and Southern University, the influence of

the formative context made it most reasonable for minority worldview holders to guard

their communications and actions within the institution.

Structural Context

An organization's structural context is the underlying set of standard social

practices that dictate how business is accomplished day-to-day. This context is comprised

of both explicit (e.g., published policies, funding requests, reporting hierarchies) and

implicit (e.g., positional power, interpretations of policies, historic access) organizational

rules. Excerpts evidenced the macro-context when they reflected how seemingly standard practices at the institution or the institution's probable responses to worldview diversity

influenced student sensemaking of the worldview climate.

Sensemaking Stories

This section shares excerpts where student stories reflected students making sense of perceived differences in institutional support or describing a campus response process.

These excerpts are exemplars because they showcase how students made sense of the way things get done at their institution. The structural context of the institution typically

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influenced student sensemaking by determining what rules or roles were reasonably available to solve problems.

Mark, Southern University. Mark's perspective on how the institution accomplished work focused on how student group events were used to support various initiatives and needs of the university. Following a series of comments about funding allocations for minority worldview groups, Mark commented:

Funding is a huge thing for student organizations. If you don't have funding,

you're basically coming out your pocket or the advisor that you have's budget.

Funding for a lot of groups is how the groups survive and how they have

sustainability. Even those these groups, these smaller groups, like the Indian

Association or VSA, which is the Vietnamese Association, or LASA, which is the

Latin American Student Association, these organization don't have that much

funding from the university like anybody else. Just because they have where they

are not based in these offices or based in Student Activities where the funding is

wider. Funding for a student organization like that is how we get that inclusion

piece together. So if all of these groups get the same amount of funding, it gives

them the same amount of opportunity, it gives them the same amount of

marketing, it gives them the same amount of grasp and ability to get their purpose

and their heritage or their views and goals out there to the diverse campus.

In this story, Mark noticed that certain groups were not as well supported by the institution from a funding standpoint. He determined that this behavior was counter to the institution's goals of creating an inclusive campus. His sensemaking lead him to conclude

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that the university's funding structure for student organizations needed to change to improve the campus worldview climate of the university, which would ultimately improve the campus' overall diversity profile.

Relatedly, Mark discussed how the type of event you hold and the weight of the campus buy-in effected the support a student group received from the campus. He made sense of the influence of the structural context by concluding the university was using larger student groups or more popular events as publicity and perhaps a form of inclusion. However, the same influence caused him to wrestle with how the smaller organizations that tend to represent minority worldviews did not have access to similar support. He shared his perspective:

When the organization finds their niche, that's when they start to push you, I

guess you could say. The other organizations start to push you, because you have

Mega Musical Chairs. In the springtime, we have this big rush of events that are

big, that are pushed. So you have Mega Musical Chairs by AED, which is Alpha

Epsilon Delta, which is Allied Health. Then you have Ooze Ball, which is from

the Southerners, which is the official ambassadors of the university. Then you

have Holi, which she mentioned, which is by the Indian Association, and all of

these other organizations- I mean all of these events that are being pushed because

they have moved past the catalyst stage to this huge entity. Now you're being

pushed because it's making money, it's getting- it's raising money rather than

anything. Universities, they love raising money anyway, but now you're being

pushed because you've moved past that catalyst stage to get the whole university

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involved. It's like, even though that's important, you're missing a lot of that other

80% of the groups that's have these little events that's trying to get there but they

don't have the resources to be pushed past that point which is where the inclusion

piece comes in. … [For these smaller groups, it starts to feel like these events are]

like a bill collector. That's how I feel, like a bill collector. You come the first of

the month, or the last year of the month to collect this bill and to get me involved

and to make sure my membership is paid. That's what it feels like.

Mark's impression of the university is plausible but does not necessarily accurately represent events, and while he has thought about the campus funding scenario before this passage shows that he is engaged in constant and ongoing sensemaking about this topic.

As he works to make sense of the campus worldview climate, his plausible path forward seems regularly blocked by the perceived structural context.

Ben, West University. Ben was a non-traditional student majoring in religious studies. He had a strong interest in interfaith interactions and seemed to continually look for new opportunities to connect across worldview difference. His keen interest in worldview-related opportunities highlighted how many of these opportunities were affected by the ebbs and flows of student group cohesiveness. He shared how the student group norms present in his university's structural context influenced his sensemaking:

The Jewish/Muslim interfaith dialogue group here… has been one of the things

I've been most excited to participate in…. And that is part of what I was referring

to earlier about being inspired about what can happen with two cultures that are

often seen to be in opposition and how they can connect. But then, also, the harsh

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reality of just the almost impossible complexity of the situation that they have to

deal with in order to resolve that. So, I've seen that work well and work not as

well, at times. And, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working as well this year

as it did last year, when I think both of those groups partly may have been brought

together by common fear of the new US administration. But now, it's different

people. Other people graduated, so some of it is just like any club on campus

where some years you'll have people who connect with each other in a good way

and other years things just kind of fall apart.

While he seemed to appreciate the concept of student groups, Ben's experiences with the inconsistencies inherent in the student group process showcased how the structural context might limit available roles and resources.

The structural context also affected how the communication and advertising norms on campus affected Ben's experience with the interfaith dialogue group. The following excerpt showed how he continued to make sense of these circumstances:

I think I was actually here a half year before I found out about the Jewish/Muslim

interfaith dialogue. … it wasn't announced in class, or anything. I guess I just

managed to meet enough people that I somehow heard about it. And, uh... So, I

really don't know how many people know what's happening, in that it's won

awards. And... people who visited from Israel or Palestine to speak with this

interfaith dialogue, who've traveled around to other countries, as well, have said

that our program is actually special and unique in that most universities probably

don't have interfaith dialogue as good as this between Jews and Muslims. And so,

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it seemed like something really special that's been going on four or five years,

now, I've been told. It's my second year participating. So, maybe the word is just

not out, but the Jewish group and the Muslim student association, each won

separate awards for what they've been doing that. …[and] they were even in

conversation with a larger organization about potentially using it as a model at

other places for interfaith dialogue, I hear.

Ben shared that these interfaith dialogues were award-winning, nationally-recognized models for connecting across worldview difference. However, the underlying rules of the institution dictated that worldview-related groups could not be university sponsored, and therefore they were subject to these inconsistencies despite their promise and the apparent need for opportunities to have these conversations on campus. Additionally, the structural context of West University did not seem to support this interfaith dialogue group through a steady advising structure or advertising. Ben's stories showcased how the influence of the structural context resulted in an inability to make sense of the circumstances and left him without a reasonable set of next steps.

Analysis: Structural Context

The influence of the structural context was often noticed by students in how

institutions were offering support for various worldview diversity activities. In many

instances, they noticed a lack of institutional support that did not match the perceived

goals of the institution, ultimately stalling their sensemaking because there was not a

reasonable path forward that accounted for all the information. Mark could not find a

path that explained how the funding structure for student groups, or the support offered to

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worldview minority groups, supported the campus' diversity goals. Ben had difficulty

making sense of how the interfaith dialogue group's efforts were nationally recognized

but seemingly uncommunicated on campus. Both of these stories highlighted the

inconsistent nature of student group funding and resulted in questioning if that venue is the right one to ensure the best climate for worldview diversity on campus. However, as changing the structural context was outside their scope of roles and resources, both Ben

and Mark failed to make sense of their respective circumstances and continued to search

for reasonable next steps.

Throughout the focus groups, institutional support was referred to in several ways

including student group funding, offering opportunities for connection across

worldviews, student or professional staffing, assistance with advertising, promoting

events, and space allocations. In the focus group context, it often seemed that the

facilitator's prompts reminded students that they had not made sense of these structural

context barriers and then students used the group forum as an opportunity to continue

their sensemaking activities. Unfortunately, stalled sensemaking seemed to result in

primarily negative impressions of the institution. Ben concluded that, even with an

award-winning interfaith dialogue model, the institution seemed comfortable that "some years you'll have people who connect with each other in a good way and other years things just kind of fall apart." Mark ended his story by describing the institution as a bill collector who approached his student group during "the last year of the month to collect

this bill and to get [them] involved and to make sure [the] membership is paid." These

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statements reflected that students typically associated the structural context negatively

with worldview diversity.

Discursive Context

The embedded, underlying narratives that influence the sensemaking process by framing what identities are available and what explanations are plausible to the

sensemaker is the discursive context of an institution. The discursive context reflected

both broad narratives perceived to affect all public institutions in some way (e.g., religion

is not academic, secular worldviews are correct, or conservatives hate certain people) and

more localized narratives that served to limit the options and explanations available for

sensemaking (e.g., this campus is secular or this campus is Christian). Students often

exhibited the influence of this context at the intersection of their worldview identity with

another of their social identities. Sometimes the discursive context seemed to be a factor

in negative cross-worldview interactions.

Sensemaking Stories

Excerpts in this section reflected the influence of the discursive context through

stories that showed how options were limited by underlying narratives affecting the

institution and its actors. Some stories show how the identities available to students were

limited within their institution while others curtailed what next steps were viewed as

reasonable. Stories address the underlying discourses of higher education or the local

institutional setting, at times in tandem.

Elian, Southeast State. Elian shared that his worldview identity had changed

several times and had settled on secular humanism during his college experience. In

189 addition to several worldviews, Elian had also changed his major several times, and spoke about his experiences on campus from these multiple perspectives. After a fellow participant had shared a story about negative worldview experiences that went un- addressed by the administration, he commented:

I also have some thoughts about how structure is prohibitive if you too strongly

embody a, I guess, non-Christian culture and the non-white culture. Yeah, any

non-normative culture at this university, because it's the only one I can speak for,

you will be disadvantaged in your academics. For all of this talk about diversity,

it's diversity in mind but it is not diversity in the body. Being able to say to

yourself, in your mind, you know, I'm an atheist, I'm Muslim, I'm Jewish, you

know, and to some extent, depending on your type of Christianity – I'm a

Christian – to the extent that you're able to functionally live that out in campus

without disadvantaging yourself, it's really, the accommodations really aren't

there. For me, I am also a black student and so very rarely in class do I ever use

dialect. The thing is I'm a verbal processor, so the best way for me to learn would

be to speak in a tongue that is more native to my mind, but I have to spend so

much processing power, carefully monitoring the way I'm saying my words so

that they will not be ill received, that I kind of lose out a little bit on that

experience.

This passage showed Elian's view of the options available to non-white, non-Christian students limited by the discursive context of the institution. He was specific that his impressions were only of this institution and not higher education more broadly.

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Elian makes sense of the normative culture using his own experiences as a black man and natively speaking in dialect. While he felt his options were limited, he managed to determine reasonable next steps for moving forward within the discursive context.

Elian shared:

I also think that from a particularly religious perspective, a lot of, and this comes

from my experience of – I've visited mosque, I visited gurdwara, I visited

synagogues in my time with the interfaith center – and so much of learning at a

young age happens in these different religious institutions. The college

environment mirrors only one of them, so the environment where you have a

speaker up front and everybody in the seats, staying seated the whole time and

just listening to the presenter is a very Christian model of learning, in which you

would have the preacher or the pastor front and everybody quietly sitting in the

seats. I've gone to synagogues where things like side comments are common and

nobody bats an eye at it. I know personally some Jewish students who will be in

class and make side comments because that's learning upbringing and then be

admonished for that. Or like I've gone to mosques and there's, like, I feel like I

can't speak to this personally, but if anyone in the room wants to add to this, but

seeing in the mosque how much the practices embodied and how much learning is

about like a mutual sense of humility and that there's something about being

seated on the floor that to me just makes you learn differently, and not having any

way to replicate that at all in your learning environment, I can imagine must be

disruptive.

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Elian extended the option limiting from identity to learning styles and made sense of the

discursive context through the lens of foundational Christian privilege. In this excerpt, the

scope of the context widened to include the entire higher education environment as complicit in limiting the modes of learning to one that most closely resembles the

Christian experience.

Duke, Midwest University. Before enrolling at Midwest University, Duke served

in the military and felt that experience shaped his worldview more than any specific

aspect of his time at college. In one story, he commented that watching women be stoned

for their worldviews while deployed was important to his own worldview development.

He also mentioned that while he grew up "religious," his personal worldview was now

practiced outside the boundaries of organized religion. During the focus group, the

facilitator shared that most students at Midwest University experienced low levels of

pressure to conform to a certain worldview. In response to this prompt, several students

shared that they were liberal or left-leaning, which caused them not to feel much pressure

to conform. Not only did these students imply that conformity would be liberal or left-

leaning, they verbalized that conservative or right-leaning students would feel differently.

As part of these responses, Duke shared:

I am a conservative. I'm not overly conservative. I'm not anything. The main thing

I feel is I just keep it to myself just because it's easier. I've never really ever talked

about it. When I say conservative I don't have a ... The main reason why I am

conservative is because I like my guns. I grew up in Wyoming. I have hunting

rifles left and right, shotguns are all in a safe. I have my concealed carry. A big

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difference for me in [this state] compared to Wyoming is you can't carry on

campuses here and there, as long as you register with the security, you can do it.

That's my main difference. The coercion thing. I just keep it to myself. A lot of

people who know my background, being in the military, they know I am, but my

main thing is I just don't talk about it because it just seems easier.

While he did not explicitly name the discursive context of a liberal norm, Duke's sensemaking about being a conservative on campus seemed influenced by this underlying narrative.

Duke and his fellow focus group participants self-defined the pressure to conform with a liberal or secular political identity. While not traditionally considered a worldview, political identity was frequently brought up as a relevant part of how students made sense of their worldviews and the constructed identity of their institution. Duke's honesty inspired the group to ask questions to further their understanding of his perspective. As he continued to verbalize his sensemaking, the perceived connection between political and worldview identities grew stronger:

I don't want to say everybody is seen as a xenophobic, misogynist ... I don't even

know what most of those words mean, but they don't sound good…. It's just one

of those things. I don't want to be labeled as one of those people because I'm not. I

don't think ... I've lived in hatred growing up... It's just terrible and I don't want to

be labeled as one of those people who, "Oh, he's right-leaning so he must hate this

kind of person." It's like, "No man. I've done things, I don't have time to hate

people." I don't want people to think I don't accept certain people because of their

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lifestyles or I don't accept people because of the color of them or their religion. I

just don't want to because that's not what I believe in, just because I lean right on

a few things.

Though this passage, Duke more explicitly tied his political identity into his worldview

and showed how the discursive context limited the identity he could hold were he more

publicly right-leaning. The association on this campus, and perhaps more widely, of

right-leaning or conservative people with hatred of certain people directly influenced the next steps Duke felt were available to him.

Analysis: Discursive Context

These student stories showed how students felt their potential identities and possible paths forward were limited by the discursive context. The two exemplars

presented in this section represent the two discursive contexts most often discussed:

foundational Christian privilege and secular campus norms. Elian's story highlighted how

Christian privilege was experienced as a discursive context that influenced student

sensemaking. He stated that it would be difficult to "functionally live [your worldview]

out in campus without disadvantaging yourself… [because] the accommodations really

aren't there." Though he identified as a Christian and primarily discussed the effects of

Christian privilege, Elian also highlighted the importance of considering worldview

identity as it intersects other social identities. He made sense of the restrictions on his

worldview expression using the reasonable and effective paths he used to navigate

campus as a Black man who preferred to speak in a dialect.

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In many ways, Duke's story provided a counterpoint to Elian's. Duke was a conservative, non-traditional, veteran student with a loosely Christian worldview attending an institution that leaned into politically liberal and secular worldviews. In that space, he typically hid his conservatism to avoid the assumptions of others. At one point, he shared, "I don't want to say everybody is seen as a xenophobic, misogynist ... [but] I don't want to be labeled as one of those people because I'm not." His options on campus were limited due to various social pressures associated with his worldview, but he also discussed how his identity options were limited by the legal system in the state that prohibited him from carrying firearms on campus. While seemingly not as relevant to the other focus group members, that aspect of attending college at Midwest University was the first restriction Duke noted as he began to tell his story.

These passages served as exemplars of the discursive context because the long descriptions showcased how the underlying narratives were influencing student sensemaking. There were times throughout the focus groups when students more casually or quickly referred to these discursive contexts within their stories. Additionally, like these examples, discursive influences are usually discussed from the perspective of a localized minority viewpoint. Elian spoke from a non-Christian non-white perspective and Duke from his identity as a conservative, both of which were minority identities on their respective campuses.

Summary

In this chapter, I presented student sensemaking stories that showcased how the sensemaking properties and macro-context influences were exhibited through student

195 stories as they made sense their encounters with worldview diversity. These findings conclusively showed that students were engaging in sensemaking about worldview diversity in both formal and informal contexts. Though the worldview environment of public higher education is primarily hands-off when it comes to students' ideological development, these stories showed that many students across several public campuses were regularly encountering worldview diversity. Each of the 60 students represented in the focus group data described an interaction across worldview difference, and many students described how they were making sense of those encounters and incorporating that sense into future campus interactions. Students shared about close friendships across worldviews, interactions with strangers, group interactions, moments in classroom settings, or more broadly encounters with the campus worldview climate. Importantly, the interactions across worldviews were not limited to students who held a specific majority, minority, nonreligious, or another worldview or any specific combination of social identities. Students in this study were not merely attending classes or eating dinner next to someone who held a different worldview but conveyed that many of those interactions resulted in deeper conversations that presented new information and prompted student sensemaking.

In addition to exploring my central research question, I approached this study with three goals in mind. First, I wanted to explore if critical sensemaking (CSM) was an appropriate conceptual framework to use for research with college students. The findings presented in this chapter support and perhaps encourage using CSM as a mechanism for understanding how students are currently processing their campus environments. This

196 study focused on student encounters with worldview diversity and, even with the inherent barriers present for worldview on public campuses, students' stories represented each of the 10 components of CSM at least 50 times through the content analysis. Additionally, the larger body of data showed that the way students discuss their thought processes aligned with using CSM as a heuristic device to understand their sensemaking.

My second goal was to examine how the components of CSM were illuminated in the context of focus groups. Several researchers had previously used interview data and commented that it was not as dynamic as they would have liked in order to observe sensemaking. I found the focus group texts to be challenging but rewarding as data sources for a CSM study. Throughout the data, students' responses to prompts from the facilitator or a comment from another student elicited extremely rich and descriptive data for analysis. I also found the focus group format offered students who may have been less likely to volunteer their whole story up front an opportunity to get comfortable in the group and share pieces across time. Specifically, I believe the stories shared by Cletus about his Sikh friend, Duke about his conservative identity, and Roxanne about her friendship with Christian students may not have emerged or showcased student sensemaking the same way outside the focus group context.

My third goal was to extend the literature concerning student perceptions of how worldview identities are supported or marginalized on public campuses. The three sections sharing student stories highlighting the influence of the macro-context on student sensemaking illuminated some initial responses to this goal. While I had engaged with the literature to understand the history of the worldview environment on public

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campuses, it was interesting to see that both foundational Christian privilege and

operational secular norms emerged in the students' stories about the formative context so

strongly. I was surprised by the negative connotations associated with students'

descriptions of the structural contexts of their institutions, especially the number of times

students mentioned direct resource allocations to worldview groups generally and

minority worldview groups specifically. In these stories, it seemed that students at public institutions expected more from their staff and administrators in terms of recognizing when unequal resource allocation was necessary to increase equality across campus.

Finally, I was very interested to see how students described the effect of the discursive context as option-shaping. Throughout the students' stories, they implied that they could not be a certain version of themselves on campus and meet their own expectations of success. While these are just initial impressions, I believe that administrators, staff, and faculty must consider how the macro-context is informing narratives, processes, and options on their campuses.

In conclusion, these students made sense of their encounters with worldview diversity on public campuses using the inter-related seven properties of sensemaking while being influenced by the macro-context. In addition to answering the research question, I was able to address three additional goals of my study. The next chapter further discusses these results.

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Chapter 5. Discussion

Campus leadership is critical for affirming and strengthening the commitment to incorporating authenticity and spiritual growth and the search for personal meaning and values as central to the mission of higher education. (Chickering et al., 2006, p. 258)

The final chapter of this dissertation puts my own sensemaking as a researcher on display. I started this project with a plan of inquiry and a defined set of knowledge about the worldview environment on public campuses, the relationship between public higher education and worldview, and the experiences and expectations students had of their campus worldview climates. Throughout the analysis process I outlined in chapter three, I continually asked myself what themes or trends in student sensemaking of worldview diversity I had noticed and bracketed. Of those bracketed circumstances, which ones were labeled as different and prompted my own sensemaking to create an explanatory story? In the midst of the coding treatments, I sometimes found it difficult to find the larger story.

However, the process of interpreting the data helped me gain the perspective needed to conclude that some of my research aims had been realized – it was clear that using critical sensemaking with college student populations was yielding valuable insights.

Through this study, I learned how these students operationalized the sensemaking properties and how they were influenced by the macro-context at their institutions.

The goal of this chapter is to summarize the study and resulting insights about

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how college students made sense of their encounters with worldview diversity. The first

part reviews the purpose of the study, the grounding literature, and how I conducted my

data analysis. For the second part of the chapter, I discuss three key findings of the study

and the implications for research and practice. Third, I discuss future directions and

limitations of the study. Finally, I share some concluding thoughts.

Review of the Study

The purpose of this study was to explore how students make sense of their

encounters with worldview diversity. I wanted to explore the in-the-moment experiences of students as they made sense of their encounters across worldview or with the campus worldview climate. I also wanted to understand how the macro-context of higher education influenced student sensemaking about worldview diversity. I was interested in the context of public institutions due to the embedded influences of Christian privilege, secularism, and the separation of church and state. The research question that guided this study was: How did students make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity?

The extant literature shows that over 80% of students are coming to campus interested in exploring spirituality (Astin et al., 2006) and 85% of students expect their campuses to be welcoming to worldviews of all kinds (Rockenbach et al., 2017). Students have consistently been interested in expressing their own worldviews (Nash, 2001;

Mayhew, Rockenbach, Correia et al., 2016), discussing spirituality or religion on campus

(Astin et al., 2011; Astin et al., 2005; Rockenbach et al., 2017), and experiencing personal growth through these encounters (Astin et al., 2011; Rockenbach et al., 2017;

Rockenbach et al., 2018). Students have remained interested in exploring their

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worldviews during college despite the secularization movement of the late 20th century

that largely removed inner development from the academic enterprise (Marsden &

Longfield, 1992).

Critical sensemaking (CSM; Helms Mills et al., 2010) is the theoretical

framework that grounded this study. CSM evolved from Weick's (1995) organizational

sensemaking, which has been used to examine and understand how organizations respond

to change (Kezar, 2013; Kezar & Eckels, 2002) and how administrators, faculty, and

graduate students engage make sense of their higher education organizations (Suspitsyna,

2013; Tomlinson & Egan, 2002; Zerquera et al., 2017). CSM has been used as a framework for the last 15 years and has been used to study how sensemaking is influenced by the formative, structural, and discursive elements of an organization's macro-context (Aromaa et al., 2018). CSM studies have focused on how individual sensemakers have demonstrated agency and how their sensemaking is situated within the macro-context. CSM served as the conceptual framework and guided my inquiry of how students were making sense of worldview diversity on public campuses.

To review, critical sensemaking includes ten components. There are seven properties taken from Weick's (1995) organizational sensemaking paradigm: identity construction, retrospection, creative enactment, social, constant and ongoing, extracted cues, and plausibility. Helms Mills et al. (2010) incorporated three contextual influences

(formative, structural, and discursive) to frame the process of making sense as situated within and influenced by the broader environment. I used these ten components as the basis of a structured content analysis to examine focus group data generated by students

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at five public institutions. The next section discusses the key findings from the data analysis.

Discussion of Key Findings

There are three major findings from this research. First, students tend to seek out

the opportunity to shed old ways of being and knowing. While much of the sensemaking

research to date has shown a tendency for organizational actors to lean into the status

quo, this study showed that student sensemakers are inclined toward opportunities to

change. Second, student sensemaking is highly social, and students often make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity through the lens of perceived social norms.

The social component of sensemaking was equally if not more important to this group of students, occurring more often in the data (112 times) than either of the theoretically centered components of identity construction (100) or plausibility (111). Third, higher

education institutions are sensegiving about worldview, power, privilege, and diversity

either unintentionally or by not having a message about these topics. Students perceived

the university as a sensegiver through how funding was allocated, who received priority

for space, how offices were staffed, and how worldview identity was seemingly less

important compared to other social identities.

These findings significantly expand the literature about student sensemaking of worldview diversity. Additionally, they offer several implications for research and practice. The next three sections describe these key findings considering the data and extant literature.

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Students Seek New Sense

Previous studies using organizational sensemaking in higher education showed a tendency among administrators and faculty to create plausible stories that allowed them to maintain the status quo (O'Meara et al., 2014; Zerquera et al., 2017). We see in this data that students tend to create plausible next steps that move away from the status quo rather than maintaining it. I noticed through the data that many students arrived on campus ready to seek out new worldview knowledge and excited by the opportunity to shed old ways of being and knowing, especially through stories that reflected the identity construction, retrospection, or discursive context components of CSM.

Most students arrived on campus expecting something different from their pre- college experiences. About her transition from an all-Asian, Daoist home to a predominantly white, secular campus, Leaf shared, "I thought I wouldn't be able to fit in, but I found people, and definitely expanded my comfort zone, and also I got to see what people that were not really like me thought." This idea of being "open" to the differences the campus worldview climate offered was echoed by many students and was evident in

Shaq's efforts on behalf of his mosque to help others understand his religion. Chandler's story about her mom's impressions of Muslims being so different than her own, and her persisting in her friendship despite those protests, also showed how students continued sensemaking away from previously held notions.

Retrospective stories also highlighted how students sought new sense in their campus environments. Discussing why she loved the interfaith center at Southeast State,

Kat said, "It's such a cool, chill place to hang out and talk to people and have good

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discussions ‘cause everyone's super open here." In her experience, the interfaith space

was more conducive to conversation and exploration across worldview difference than

other places on campus. At Midwest University, Alex talked about his own response to

the perceived polarization of campus, saying, "I feel myself becoming more open because

people are more polarized and I'm trying to depolarize people. I'm a huge empath and a

fixer." He discussed cultivating a relationship across worldview difference with a

Christian pastor, through these conversations learned and appreciated their message, and used that message when confronting a Christian protestor later that year.

This tendency to seek new sense was also evident through student stories highlighting the influence of the discursive context; while students were not always able to name these underlying narratives, they broadly disagreed that available identities and

options should be limited by them. Elian described the campus environment at Southeast

State for non-normative worldview identities, saying, "…to the extent that you're able to

functionally live that out in campus without disadvantaging yourself, it's really, the

accommodations really aren't there." While perhaps doubtful that the campus

environment could change, Elian's story of various identity-limiting discursive contexts

and continuing to seek new plausible paths reflect his rejection of the status quo. Duke at

Midwest State shared simply, "I don't want to be labeled as one of those people because

I'm not." His plausible path forward created space for his nuanced conservative identity

by choosing to "pass" as a more liberal student and keep quiet about his beliefs.

However, neither he nor other students in the focus group liked this solution and

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expressed wanting the campus worldview environment to change in order for new

identities and plausible paths to be available.

These stories describe how students made sense of their worldviews and those of

others in a way that changed the plausible stories available to them. Additionally, discursive contexts that limited the identities and paths available to them or others did not

make sense to these students. Perhaps students, who are primarily engaged in changing

and developing their knowledge, awareness, and skills in both curricular and social

spaces, have a fundamentally different orientation to sensemaking in the campus

environment. Additionally, they have less investment in the organizational certainty that

results from maintaining the status quo (O'Meara et al., 2014). In these ways, their

tendency to seek new sense and create new plausible paths forward as a result of

sensemaking about worldview diversity aligns with their student status.

Students are Highly Social Sensemakers

Examining the pattern of the structural code applications revealed that students

most often make sense of these encounters through four of the seven sensemaking

categories: 1) social; 2) plausibility; 3) extracted cues; and, 4) identity construction. The

other three sensemaking elements – constant and ongoing, retrospective, and creative

enactment – were present but verbalized approximately half as often as the other

categories. Helms Mills et al. (2010) centered identity construction and plausibility as the

primary drivers for sensemaking activity, which is upheld but extended by this study. The

data showed that student sensemaking is framed equally by the social and extracted cue

properties with plausibility and identity construction. Additionally, the importance of

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social function to student sensemakers was not just represented in the social property but

also through extracted cues and the influence of the structural context.

The social property of sensemaking that considers the relationship between

individual thinking and social function was most prevalent among these student stories.

When making sense of encounters with worldview diversity, these students' plausible

paths forward often considered how their decision would impact their perceived,

localized society. For example, Celeste at Heartland State described her willingness to help others understand her Wiccan practice. She said, "I feel like that's me sort of doing

my part to break down barriers and missed perceptions and stuff that people have about

like, other religions." Even though there were times this plausible path made her feel

individually uncomfortable, she pursued it because it enhanced her society. Social

contexts, especially friendships, were also important sensemaking triggers and helped

students explore various worldviews. Roxanne, who had started her college career at

Midwest University strongly hating Christians, revised her individual thinking based on

friendships with Christian students. She shared, "I did get close to them and they started

to change that [view] because I started to realize that maybe not all Christians are like the

Christians that I've come into contact in my past." Cletus at Southern University

described a new friendship started in one of his classes, saying, "One of the young ladies

in the class that I'm currently in, she is a Sikh-ist and before this year I didn't know what

that religion was at all." Many students across the data described how a previously held

belief system stopped making sense in light of a personal relationship across worldviews.

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Students also framed how they made sense of circumstances using the property of

extracted cues, or the communications or actions the students notice, to create plausible paths forward that considered the impact on the local society. Many of these examples highlight negative cross-worldview encounters as triggers for student sensemaking. John,

an international student at Heartland State, described how he made sense of the actions of

others based on the cues he extracted from the media. As a Pakistani Muslim, he had

experienced several negative cross-worldview encounters, but said, "I don't feel bad

about those people because their perspective was bad. The way they were exposed to

different certain things like media, stuff like that." Ita, a Jewish student at Southern

University, had also experienced negative encounters she perceived to be prompted by

passive Christian normativity or active anti-Semitism. Her experiences with the campus

worldview climate caused her to conclude that Southern had "a very normative campus

and ranging from meh, to at times violently hostile, to any sort of variation," and her

plausible path forward included withdrawal from parts of campus society. At West

University, the campus worldview climate norms were more secular. One of these

students, John, described an experience in his residence hall, saying, "…the majority of

the hall I was in was not religious, and there was one religious person in the corner. It

was sort of like, 'Oh, we have a Christian.'" From the corporate response of his hallmates,

John extracted the cue that Christianity was non-normative and while that made sense on

campus, he worried about the impact of that societal norm on the student and the campus

society.

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Many students recognized that the social functioning of campus was informed by the formative context of their university. Trenton, a student at Heartland State, frequently pointed to ways the campus was demographically similar to its regional, Midwestern area as how he made sense that people were not more engaged across worldview differences.

He said, "We have a center for multicultural education, we have diversity officers... I would say the university does a good job promoting them, it's just the university can only promote so much, and then it's up to the students to engage with that." While others in his focus group equated the same formative context with an overtly Christian campus worldview climate, Trenton's plausible story focused more on social circles that did not create opportunities for exposure to worldview diversity. Seymour from West University commented more directly on the campus worldview climate for Christian students. He said, "It's not outright volatile, and it's not very mean, but living in other parts of the

United States, the majority is usually Christianity, and here it's kind of the opposite." His sensemaking was influenced by the structural context through the experiences of friends holding Christian worldviews, again underscoring the social nature of student sensemaking.

As these student stories highlight, encounters with worldview diversity on campus happen in the context of almost every campus space (i.e. classrooms, residence halls, student unions, public walkways) and across many types of relationships (i.e. peer, faculty, staff, parent). Potentially, as sensemaking has not yet been used with this population, the salience of these aspects can be explained by priorities present within the student environment on college campuses as opposed to the faculty, administrator, or

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graduate student populations previously explored. A key takeaway from this study is that

students make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity by looking for plausible paths forward that make sense not only for themselves but also for their friends and local

society.

Institutional Sensegiving about Worldview Diversity

Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991) pointed to the importance of organizational sensegiving as part of the sensemaking process. In the context of this study, sensegiving

occurred when students packaged their perceptions of the institution and communicated it

to other students in their focus groups. This step was preceded by students making sense

of the messages they were receiving from the institution about its worldview identity, the campus worldview climate, and the ways that worldviews should inform decision making on campus. Sensegiving, or projected sensemaking (Weick et al., 2005), is used proactively by organizations to guide the process of organizational identity construction.

Public higher education offers many examples of intentional sensegiving, including mission statements and strategic plans (Kezar & Eckels, 2002; Zerquera et al., 2017).

However, the findings of this study show that students at public institutions are receiving informal or unintentional sensegiving about the campus worldview climate, and often student sensemakers are constructing a version of the institutional identity that may not reflect the goals of campus leadership. Institutional sensegiving about campus worldview diversity was highlighted by the influence of the structural context and the plausibility and constant and ongoing properties of sensemaking.

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Students received sensegiving from their public institutions through the absence

of communication about worldview diversity on campus. The sensemaking stories

revealed that the dominant social norms of an institution do affect student encounters

with worldview diversity. Joseph at Southern University discussed his perception that the

regional segregation by race and worldview affected the need for the campus community

to engage across difference, and commented that, "a lot of the higher up administration

people, they've been here a very long time, and they still have the same views as when

[Southern U] was a smaller school." His sensemaking process highlighted the property of

plausibility, concluding that the institution did not do more to promote inclusion of

diverse worldviews because the campus leadership was out of touch with the student body. At West University, Nicole commented that while the campus climate was "very atheist, nonreligious, non-spiritual," her experiences supported that there were fairly large populations of people whose beliefs affected their worldviews. Due to the climate, these

groups operated as "sub-communities and sort of on the down low," leading her to

conclude that while the campus was diverse it was very open. Nicole was continuing to

make sense of her impressions during the focus group, and mentioned the secular campus

climate, the unacknowledged presence of strong faith communities, the vocally secular

professoriate, and the known inclination of college students to try new things as a

package of communication from the institution. These stories show how the absence of

communication about expectations and norms from campus leadership was still received

by students as institutional sensegiving about the campus worldview climate.

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Several student stories revealed that institutions privilege non-religious and majority worldview groups in terms of the funding, staffing, and support offered to worldview-based groups. Mark at Southern University discussed the importance of funding for student groups to maintain their presence on campus, and his opinion that more equal funding would result in a more inclusive worldview climate on campus. He shared that smaller organizations with more worldview diversity "don't have that much funding from the university like anybody else. Just because they have where they are not based in these offices or based in Student Activities where the funding is wider." At

Southeast State, Sarah noted that her Muslim student group had less staffing, funding, and space access than even other worldview minority groups on campus and that all worldview groups experienced less privilege. Still trying to make sense of these circumstances, she shared, "I do feel like it is a little bit systematic in the way that there is some, what is it called, not prejudice, but like disadvantages for religious groups on campus." This impression was linked to "certain rules put in place that… weren't specifically targeting... but… definitely disadvantaging us as a faith-based organization."

These two accounts show how the perceived worldview climate at an institution was impacted by the available student groups, students' perception of who receives what from the institution, and students’ ability to navigate their worldview practices with higher-power campus actors (e.g., faculty, administrators). While perhaps unintentional, these messages were received as institutional sensegiving about which types of student groups are more important to the campus community.

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Public institutions must be aware that sensegiving often occurs outside of their

control. Student sensemaking of worldview diversity is often informed by what campuses are not saying or what student groups are not receiving as opposed to more formal, intentional messages from campus leadership. As many public institutions are unlikely to make statements directly about worldview-related topics (Blumenfeld, 2006; Seifert,

2007), campus leaders must understand that they are still indirectly sensegiving to their students. If possible, institutions should work to proactively sensegive about the available worldview resources, the support structures available for worldview-based student groups, and worldview-related resources beyond the borders of campus. In the next section, I share further recommendations for research and practice.

Implications for Research: Making further Sense

Three key implications for research emerged from this study. The critical sensemaking (CSM) framework is appropriate and meaningful as conceptual theory for use with 1) worldview diversity encounters, 2) students as actors, and 3) focus groups as primary data sources. Each of these are new uses of CSM and respond to several recommendations from the literature. First, using CSM to examine worldview diversity extended the range of topics that have been explored using the framework (Aromaa et al.,

2018) and also continued to support CSM as a tool for understanding "how identity is embedded in and from selected discourses" (Helms Mills et al., 2010, p. 193). Second, this study is one of the first to center undergraduate students as the sensemakers of interest and successfully used CSM as a heuristic to explore their experiences. While previous studies in higher education had used a Weickian sensemaking to explore the

212 how faculty made sense of campus change processes through a “bottom up” approach

(Kezar, 2013), none had examined students as they made sense of their campus climate.

Importantly, this study also showed that students make sense of their campus environments differently than other actors such as faculty or administrators. Third, this study used focus group data to explore the experiences of student sensemakers. Several studies summarized by Aromaa et al. (2018) used CSM with interviews in addition to document analysis to understand sensemaking and reflected that a more dynamic form of communicative data may improve our understanding of sensemaking. Focus group data was used effectively with CSM in this study and provided an effective medium for examining more elusive properties of sensemaking (e.g., constant and ongoing, structural contexts).

Analysis of this study showed that four properties of sensemaking are often used as sensemaking lenses for student actors (social, plausibility, identity construction, and extracted cues). We know that students are arriving on campuses with the expectation that they will encounter worldview difference (Mayhew, Rockenbach, Correia et al.,

2016). This study shows that once on campus, students at public institutions are encountering worldview diversity in a variety of contexts that create some ambiguity and subsequently engaging in sensemaking of these encounters. And though sensemaking is a process of concurrent processes – meaning that it is retrospective while being social while being subject to extracted cues, et cetera – this analysis revealed that certain sensemaking processes are more likely to be verbalized by students. This distinction is important because the related process of sensegiving is dependent on an organizational actors’

213 ability to package their sensemaking into a communicable form (Gioia & Chittipeddi,

1991), allowing us to interpret the focus group data as the formed and packaged sensemaking of these students. While this single study is not conclusive, these results indicated that the sensemaking behaviors of students expecting to experience development during college may be different than employees in organizations.

Third, this study showed that the macro-context of public institutions does influence how students make sense of their encounters with worldview diversity. The findings reveal that these encounters are regularly occurring across types of public institutions and various demographic characteristics of students. Second, this work complements and nuances many pieces of the IDEALS study. For example, Rockenbach et al. (2018) discuss several influential features of campuses that encourage the development of appreciative attitudes including providing space for support and spiritual expression. The findings of this study can inform campus leadership about the types of situations where students feel plausible next steps are constrained by discursive contents, how the formative contexts of their institutions may be contributing (or not) to the student experience of worldview expression, and how the structural contexts are reifying inequities for worldview-based student groups. Finally, representing the dual campus realities of Christian normativity and secular bias is a difficult task, but the findings presented through this study highlight this tension. Further research should continue explore how these influences manifest in the sensemaking of students or other organizational actors.

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Implications for Practice: Giving further Sense

The key implications for practice are drawn from the findings that touch most directly on the student experience. First, the data revealed that social functioning and extracted cues were most often employed by student sensemakers to create plausible action steps after encounters with worldview diversity. It is imperative for practitioners to

understand that students are generally tending to embrace change as opposed to the status

quo as part of their sensemaking process. However, though this tendency emerged, it

must be framed within the body of student development theory work that helps us

understand how ideological shifts occur across the span of college. It is not reasonable to

expect one provocative encounter to dramatically change a student’s ideology. This study

reveals, though, that students are encountering, noticing, participating, recognizing,

identifying, interpreting, and examining their environments for encounters with

worldview diversity requiring sensemaking. Practitioners should be prepared to sensegive

about the place of worldview diversity on campus in ways that inform sensemaking.

Understanding what sensemaking property students are most likely to employ after

labeling a set of circumstances as "different" can offer student affairs professionals and

faculty relevant guidance for promoting students' worldview development.

Second, this study showed how students perceived their public institutions as

sensegivers about worldview diversity as part of their sensemaking. Practitioners must

understand that both their communication and absence of communication about

worldview-related matters sends a message to students that they use to inform their sensemaking about worldview diversity. Several students throughout the focus groups

215 pointed out that worldview is not something that can be seen, so support for worldview- related activities must be intentionally communicated or it could be assumed to be absent.

Finally, it is concerning that there is a clear perception that students in worldview- minority student groups have significantly less access to resources. These student groups are not a monolith – students who need to pray often may likely need more physical capital than financial capital, while students whose worldviews are primarily informed by great thinkers may need more financial capital but less human capital, and so on. A key recommendation for practice from this study is to perform an audit of the resources available to worldview minority groups, the regularity with which they access those resources, and the perceptions students have about which students have access to which resources. Additionally, public institutions must understand that there are option-reducing discursive contexts already in place and having an impact on their students and causing them to feel unsafe, unheard, and unwelcome. Hopefully, these insights will help institutions to evaluate some of these practices and innovate their sensemaking and sensegiving to better align with their mission, vision, and values.

Finally, this study continues to support previous recommendations (Astin et al.,

2011; Mayhew & Rockenbach, 2014; Nash, 2001; Seifert, 2007;Stewart et al., 2011) that practitioners and faculty need to be more prepared for students to want to make sense of these encounters and be encouraged in their own sensemaking and sensegiving capacities.

The elements of sensemaking and the concept processes were consistently evident across all five campuses and student participants. This means that faculty, staff, and administrators interested in contributing to the student sensemaking process are able to

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determine probable entry points through this type of content analysis. This study revealed

some informative trends about student sensemaking of worldview diversity at public

institutions:

1) Students are regularly encountering peers holding worldviews different than

their own and participating in both unstructured and structured activities with

them;

2) Students are using these opportunities to examine the worldviews of these other

students, often while recognizing how the campus context is different than

their family or hometown origins;

3) Students are identifying how they have grown personally through their

encounters with worldview diversity, including developing the ability to

identify spaces or interactions that require them to be more cautious with their

actions or communication; and,

4) On most campuses, students are encountering Christian-normative practices

and on all campuses noting less institutional support for certain worldview-

related activities.

Much of the conversation about students’ engagement with faith, religion, and

spirituality on public campuses has been sidestepped citing separation of church and state

(Marsden, 1992), focused on an individual students’ quest for meaning (Nash, 2001), or

most recently centered on how students are making meaning of interfaith interactions

(Rockenbach et al., 2017). In some instances, the ambiguity directly affected the student actor (e.g., identifying spaces requiring caution, recognizing contextual difference from

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origin) while in other circumstances it affected another student (e.g., noticing less

institutional support, encountering Christianity as normative). Especially in contexts

related to worldview on public campuses, there is a tendency to avoid the worldview

identity of a student because it is messy, contentious, staff are not trained, or otherwise

difficult to handle (Stewart et al., 2011). However, the findings of this study show that

the worldview identity has salience to the student and should not be ignored.

Future Directions: Continued Ambiguity

There are myriad future lines of inquiry stemming from this study that stand out

as most needed to complement other work about worldview diversity. First, many student

stories reflected an interaction with a faculty member that was noticed and bracketed as a

reason for sensemaking by students. It would be fruitful to design a similarly situated study to examine how faculty at public institutions are making sense of their encounters

with worldview diversity and use the critical sensemaking framework as a ground. This

might help us understand the disconnects present in these relationships, how faculty are

making sense of the diversity of worldviews in their classes, and how the macro-context affects their sensemaking. Additionally, this would allow for an examination of their sensemaking to see if the social context and extracted cues are similarly important to faculty as they are for students when encountering worldview diversity.

Second, it would be interesting to extend this study with an examination of student encounters with worldview diversity using Gioia & Chittipeddi’s (1991) concepts

of sensegiving as the primary theoretical framework. In what ways are students and other

campus actors actively packaging their sensemaking about worldview diversity for other

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parties, and what are the prompts or motivators for doing so? How, if at all, are students

interpreting and communicating their interactions with the macro-context for other

students? While it was evident through this study that students were able to recount their

experiences, a form of verbal sensegiving, it would be helpful for campuses to understand

what students holding what identities, job functions, or character traits are most often

interpreting worldview diversity on their campuses.

Third and finally, returning to sensemaking’s roots in organizational literature,

several findings emerged from this study that may cause concern on the part of public

institutions. It would be interesting to do a concurrent examination of how several public

and private campuses are making sense of the increased worldview diversity on their

campuses using the critical sensemaking theoretical framework. Public institutions are

often more reflective of their environments than other campuses (Cohen, 1998) and it

would be helpful to know if these issues emerge across institutional types or if the public

institution environment is, in fact, particularly more sensitive to the macro-contexts for

worldview diversity.

Limitations: Study in Context

There were several limitations to this study. First, I was only able to explore the sensemaking verbalized by students through the focus groups. Sensemaking is a process of knowing, and as what is known is not always verbalized, there may be some key elements of student sensemaking that were not revealed through this study. Second, choosing critical sensemaking as the framework for this study focused the results on student process and institutional context, which may ignore other important aspects of

219

cross-worldview encounters (e.g., meaning making, activism, moral development). Third,

this study only included students at public institutions, which may limit the applicability

of the findings to other contexts. Fourth, organizational sensemaking was evaluated

through the medium of student voices. It is possible that aspects of organizational

sensemaking remained hidden despite the students shared dynamic information sharing in

the focus group setting. Finally, there are myriad potential limitations inherent in the

process of a secondary data analysis. It is my hope that sharing these limitations frame

how this study can and cannot be applied to other contexts (Marshall & Rossman, 2016).

Conclusion

This study offered a unique understanding of how students are making sense of

their encounters with worldview diversity at public institutions. The worldview climate in

higher education is important to explore but messy to experience, especially in the current

political climate that has so closely tied religious worldview and political leaning

together. Throughout the analysis phase of this study, I was struck by two related but

different aspects of sensemaking that affect our interactions with worldview diversity on

campus.

The first was the importance of the pre-sensemaking step of labeling something as relevant and therefore worthy of sensemaking. As I reflected on my own professional experiences in student affairs, I was reminded how often I had conversations with students about their roommate, a group project, or some other social context where they were able to, in the language of this study, notice and bracket key information but then did not label it as relevant. As someone who is regularly considering my own worldview

220

and the worldviews of those around me, I think my tendency to label those topics as

relevant is high but recognize the role identity salience might play in cross-worldview encounters.

Second, the strong and pervasive influence of the macro-context was expected but also surprising. The CSM language that described the discursive context as "option- shaping" was powerful for me to consider as a researcher and practitioner, and I hope this work has highlighted ways we can increase the options available for diverse worldview holders on campus. I believe we must continue to unpack and examine how the macro- context influences are shaping narratives in higher education and specifically on public campuses. It is my hope that this study has illuminated how students are making sense of their encounters with worldview diversity and concurrently challenged the higher education community to examine our collective sensemaking of the campus worldview climate.

221

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APPENDIX A: Focus Group Interview Protocol

IDEALS Case Study Student Focus Group Interview Protocol (45-90 Minutes)

• Researcher 1 will conduct the focus group and complete memo upon conclusion of the interview. • Researcher 2 will oversee check-in, collect all forms/notecards, take notes throughout (including documenting who is speaking), and manage the recording device. • Note: Both researchers should be attuned to who is speaking at any given time, and prompt participants to announce themselves using their pseudonyms every time they speak.

As students arrive/enter, share copies of the consent form and demographic survey with them. Ask them to have a seat and peruse these documents while we wait for other group members to arrive. Let them know their signed consent form and completed survey will be collected when the focus group begins.

Point out that students can choose a pseudonym and record it at the top of the demographic survey to ensure confidentiality. Also ask them to fill out a name plate with their pseudonym and place it such that it is visible to other members of the group.

Bolded questions are those related to the core of the research; do not skip. Anything marked as PROBE can be used as needed to dig deeper into the overarching question; use discretion.

Once everyone has arrived and forms have been collected… Thank you for taking the time to participate in this focus group today. I am and this is . We are both members of the research team for the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS). I will be asking you a series of questions during our time together today, and will be taking notes as we go.

As you know from reading the consent form, this study is intended to shed light on how students, faculty, and staff holding different worldviews perceive and experience religious and worldview diversity within their campus community. To facilitate our conversation today, I would like to define a few terms:

• The term “worldview” describes a guiding philosophy or outlook on life, which may be based on a particular religious tradition, spiritual orientation, non-religious perspective, or some combination of these.

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● “Interfaith” describes the coming together of people or perspectives rooted in different religious, spiritual, or nonreligious beliefs.

For the purpose of this focus group, you will be invited to share your perceptions of worldview diversity and interfaith engagement on this campus. In doing so, please feel free to draw from, and describe, any personal experiences that are relevant to the study.

There are no right or wrong answers to the questions I will ask, and you are welcome to refrain from answering anything that you would rather not discuss. Also, please feel free to excuse yourself at any time without consequence. This conversation is strictly confidential and care will be taken by the researchers to exclude names and identifying information from the data when they are reported. I also ask that you do not share what is said in this interview with anyone outside of this group.

Do you have questions before we begin? Answer any questions raised. Now, let’s get started.

QUESTION BLOCK 1:

First of all, I’d like you to complete a short exercise to get us all thinking about how we develop our worldviews—that is, our outlook on life—during college. Please take a few minutes to respond in writing to the prompt on this card. Hand out cards and read prompt. When you’re done, turn the card over and write your pseudonym on the back.

Give approximately 3 minutes for this exercise.

Thank you. Now I’d like to move into the question portion of this focus group. We are going to audio record this conversation so that your thoughts and experiences are accurately documented. I ask that you do your best to state your pseudonym each time you speak, so we can recall which comments are yours when listening to the recording later on.

Begin audio recording.

1. Let’s begin by introducing ourselves. Tell me your name (pseudonym), your major, your year in school, and share briefly how your responded to the prompt on your card.

PROBE: What aspects of the college environment have been particularly instrumental in shaping your worldview?

2. Have your attitudes toward people of other religions and worldviews changed at all while you have been in college? If yes, in what ways? To what do you attribute these changes in your attitudes?

QUESTION BLOCK 2:

Next, I’d like to discuss your perceptions of the campus environment at INSTITUTION, as well as students’ experiences and attitudes about religious and worldview diversity.

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3. How would you describe the climate for religion, spirituality, and worldview on your campus?

PROBE: What factors do you think contribute to creating the climate for religion, spirituality, and worldview on your campus?

PROBE: To what extent do you feel comfortable expressing your religions or nonreligious beliefs on campus? If you don’t feel comfortable, what causes that discomfort? If you do feel comfortable, what does the campus do that helps promote that comfort?

4. Among a group of entering first-year students we surveyed at INSTITUTION, XX percent expected that EXPECTATION FINDING. Do you share this expectation? Do you think your campus works to accomplish this? How so?

5. When we asked students at INSTITUTION about CLIMATE (e.g., conflict among people holding different worldview perspectives), we found that XX AMOUNT (XX%) believed X ABOUT CLIMATE on campus, and XX percent felt this campus is X CLIMATE FACT. Would you agree with that generally? Personally?

6. Through the IDEALS survey, we also asked students at INSTITUTION a series of questions to gauge their KNOWLEDGE/ATTITUDES of different worldviews. Over the course of their first year in college, these students’ STATISTIC ABOUT THESE OUTCOMES IMPROVED/DECLINED by XX percent. To what might you attribute this finding?

QUESTION BLOCK 3:

Finally, we are going to spend some time talking about your involvement in religious diversity- related activities in college.

7. Have you been involved in religious and worldview diversity activities and/or interfaith-related activities on campus (e.g., interfaith dialogue, interfaith prayer vigil, interfaith service project)? If so, tell us about those experiences.

PROBE: What factors impacted your decision to participate in these activities?

8. Do you feel that your understanding of other worldview perspectives has grown/developed through your participation in these activities? How so?

PROBE: Where on campus do most of these activities take place? Or, where do you find yourself discussing interfaith topics the most? Note responses for possible observation sites.

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9. Have you heard of Interfaith Youth Core? How did you learn about them? Have you been involved with IFYC on your campus? Why or why not?

PROBE: Are you familiar with on your campus? How have you learned about or participated in their programs?

10. [If they answered YES above.] What is the most useful thing IFYC/these programs have done to support your involvement in interfaith efforts on campus?

WRAP-UP:

1. Lastly, I want to ask if there anything else you would like to share that we didn’t already cover?

Those are all the questions I have for you. If you think of something you would like to add after leaving today, please feel free to email us. Also, be on the lookout for an email containing information about accessing your $15 Amazon gift card. Thanks for your time!

Be sure all notecards have been collected and that each has a pseudonym on the back.

After participants depart, Researcher 1 should complete a memo documenting their impressions from the interview (using protocol provided).

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APPENDIX B: Demographics

Focus Group Participant Demographics Evan- Worldview Religious or Political Gender Sexual Inter- Institution Pseudonym Worldview Identity Race/ Ethnicity gelical Category Spiritual Leaning Identity Orientation national Anthony Christianity, Protestant Yes Majority Both Conservative Man Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Celeste Paganism No Minority Both Liberal Woman Bisexual White/ Caucasian No Dillon Agnosticism No Nonreligious Spiritual Very Liberal Man Bisexual White/ Caucasian No Emma Christianity, Protestant No Majority Religious Conservative Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Jack Atheism No Nonreligious Spiritual Very Liberal Man Bisexual White/ Caucasian No Prefer not to James Secular Humanism No Nonreligious Spiritual Moderate Man White/ Caucasian No answer Prefer not to Jane I prefer not to respond No n/a Spiritual Moderate Woman White/ Caucasian No answer Heartland Asian American / John Islam No Minority Religious Man Heterosexual Yes State Asian Nicole Christianity, Protestant No Majority Both Liberal Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Another Worldview Rose (Believe in God but No Another Spiritual Moderate Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No not Bible) Christianity, Roman Rosemary No Majority Both Moderate Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Catholic Mexican American/ Trenton Agnosticism No Nonreligious Neither Liberal Man Heterosexual No Chicano; White/ Caucasian

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Chris Agnosticism No Nonreligious Neither Moderate Man Gay White/ Caucasian No Native American/ Buddhism; Christianity, Duke No Minority Spiritual Conservative Man Heterosexual Alaska Native; No LDS White/ Caucasian African Jessica Christianity, Protestant No Majority Both Liberal Woman Heterosexual No American/ Black Katie Christianity, Orthodox No Majority Spiritual Liberal Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Other: African Kenny Nondenominational Yes Majority Both Moderate Woman Heterosexual American/ Black; No Christian White/ Caucasian Lucy Judaism No Minority Spiritual Very liberal Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Christianity, Roman Asian American/ Midwest Mai No Majority Spiritual Moderate Woman Heterosexual No Catholic Asian University Mike Atheism No Nonreligious Neither Conservative Man Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Christianity, Church of Asian American/ Olivia Jesus Christ of Latter- No Minority Both Liberal Woman Heterosexual Yes Asian Day Saints Roxanne Atheism No Nonreligious Neither Very liberal Woman Lesbian White/ Caucasian No Sarah Christianity, Protestant Yes Majority Both Liberal Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Asian American/ Shaq Islam No Minority Both Moderate Man Heterosexual No Asian African Tom Christianity, Protestant No Majority Both Very liberal Man Bisexual No American/ Black Other: Moroccan Ursa Islam No Minority Religious Very liberal Woman Lesbian Amazigh No American

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Appendix B, Continued Evan- Worldview Religious or Political Gender Sexual Inter- Institution Pseudonym Worldview Identity Race/ Ethnicity gelical Category Spiritual Leaning Identity Orientation national Another Another Andrew Islam No Minority Both Very liberal (Grey White/ Caucasian No (Agender) Spectrum) Another (Christianity, Aslane Yes Majority Both Liberal Woman Bisexual White/ Caucasian No Nondenominational) African American/ Black; Agnosticism; Secular Elian No Nonreligious Neither Liberal Man Bisexual Another No Humanism (Trinidadian American) Mexican American/ Chicano; Native Ita Judaism No Minority Religious Liberal Woman Bisexual American/ Alaska No Native; Another Southeast (Ashkenazi State Jewish)

Johar Islam No Minority Both Very Liberal Man Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No

Kat Christianity, Protestant Yes Majority Both Liberal Woman Bisexual White/ Caucasian No Mary Grace Christianity, Protestant Yes Majority Both Moderate Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No African American/ Black; Nathalia Atheism No Nonreligious Neither Liberal Woman Heterosexual No Asian American/ Asian Riesly Nonreligious No Nonreligious Spiritual Liberal Woman Queer White/ Caucasian No Christianity, Protestant Rio (Nondenominational/ Yes Majority Both Moderate Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Baptist) Sarah Islam No Minority Both Liberal Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No

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Appendix B, Continued Evan- Worldview Religious or Political Gender Sexual Inter- Institution Pseudonym Worldview Identity Race/ Ethnicity gelical Category Spiritual Leaning Identity Orientation national Christianity, Roman African Chandler No Majority Spiritual Liberal Woman Heterosexual No Catholic American/ Black Cletus Christianity, Protestant Yes Majority Both Moderate Man Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No James Atheism No Nonreligious Neither Moderate Man Gay White/ Caucasian No African James II Christianity, Protestant No Majority Spiritual Moderate Man Heterosexual No American/ Black Christianity, Roman Asian American/ Jason No Majority Spiritual Liberal Man Bisexual No Catholic Asian African Jessica Christianity, Protestant No Majority Spiritual Moderate Woman Heterosexual No American/ Black Southern Jessica Nonreligious No Nonreligious Neither Moderate Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No University African Joseph Christianity, Protestant No Majority Spiritual Very Liberal Man Heterosexual No American/ Black African Mark Spiritual Yes Nonreligious Spiritual Liberal Man Heterosexual No American/ Black Christianity, Church of African Raya Jesus Christ of Latter- No Minority Spiritual Moderate Woman Heterosexual No American/ Black Day Saints Other Latino/a; Seth Christianity, Protestant No Majority Both Moderate Man Heterosexual No White/ Caucasian Student1 Christianity, Protestant Yes Majority Religious Conservative Man Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No

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Appendix B, Continued Evan- Worldview Religious or Political Gender Sexual Inter- Institution Pseudonym Worldview Identity Race/ Ethnicity gelical Category Spiritual Leaning Identity Orientation national Mexican Christianity, Roman Amanda No Majority Both Moderate Woman Heterosexual American/ No Catholic Chicano Another worldview Ben No Another Both Moderate Man Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No (Meher Baba devotee) Asian American/ Fry Atheism No Nonreligious Neither Moderate Woman Heterosexual No Asian West John Atheism No Nonreligious Neither Moderate Man Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No University John Atheism No Nonreligious Neither Liberal Man Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Asian American/ Leaf None No Nonreligious Neither Liberal Woman Heterosexual No Asian Nicole Christianity, Protestant Yes Majority Both Moderate Woman Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Seymour Agnosticism; Atheism No Nonreligious Spiritual Very liberal Man Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No Taryn Atheism No Nonreligious Neither Liberal Woman Bisexual White/ Caucasian No Will Atheism No Nonreligious Spiritual Liberal Man Heterosexual White/ Caucasian No

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APPENDIX C: Process Flowchart

Appendix C. Mayring's (2014) Process Flowchart for Structuring Content Analysis (p. 96)

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APPENDIX D: Code Applications by Transcript

Code Applications by Focus Group Transcript via Dedoose Software Tabulation Focus Group Identity Creative Constant Extracted Formative Structural Discursive Retrospective Social Plausibility Transcript construction enactment and ongoing cues contexts contexts contexts Heartland State - FG1 6 3 2 5 7 7 9 3 4 5 Heartland State - FG2 6 4 1 6 2 3 3 1 0 2 Heartland State - FG3 2 1 1 1 3 3 4 4 0 0 Heartland State - FG4 8 1 4 10 4 8 10 5 2 4 Midwest U - FG1 14 3 6 9 3 9 13 3 7 3 Midwest U - FG2 6 6 2 6 3 4 4 0 3 5 Midwest U - FG3 5 2 1 4 1 2 2 0 2 0 Southeast State - FG1 6 2 5 11 3 6 3 2 4 4 Southeast State - FG2 8 5 2 5 4 13 6 4 11 8 Southeast State - FG3 11 4 2 13 7 8 6 4 3 4 Southern U - FG1 1 4 1 5 7 9 5 2 6 3 Southern U - FG2 4 4 6 10 6 13 13 9 6 8 West U - FG1 6 4 2 8 4 3 12 7 0 2 West U - FG2 11 6 8 16 2 9 13 6 11 8 West U - FG3 6 2 3 3 6 5 8 4 1 6 Total Applications 100 51 46 112 62 102 111 54 60 62

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