Adriana Aldana earned her doctorate from the Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Developmental Psychology at the University of Michigan. Before moving to her graduate studies, she attended California State University, Northridge, where she earned a BA in Chicano Studies and Psychology in 2007. In 2014, she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Planning, Policy, and Design at the University of California, Irvine. She is a community-based practitioner and developmental psychologist, with an emphasis on youth sociopolitical empowerment. Her scholarship examines how participatory action research and multicultural organizing models build youths’ capacity for anti-racism engagement. Her research with diverse youth has identified the processes that promote the ability of young people to think critically about their social identity, systems of privilege and oppression, and inclusive social action tactics. As a practitioner, she has organized social justice workshops, managed a community-based youth dialogue program, and developed program curricula for K-12 educators and youth’s multicultural training. LinkedIn profile | Research Gate profile
MSW Online
Please share your story with our readers about how you got into social work.
Adriana Aldana
Great. When I talked to students about this, I start by sharing that I was a first generation college student, and it took me some time to figure out my career path. I was always a “successful” student that was getting good grades and making academic progress, but I didn’t have a clear idea in mind of what I wanted my career to be. And so, as an undergrad I was just taking courses that I thought were interesting to me and covered the requirements. Late in my third year or early in my fourth year, my academic advisor called me and said, “You need to declare a major.” I was like, “I still don’t know what I want to do.” She mentioned that I was about three credits shy of a Chicana/o Studies major and that she would recommend that I just pursue that since it seems like I was taking those courses. And at that time I was also taking my first psychology class and really enjoying it. And so I said, “Okay, well, I think I could do the Chicano/ Chicana studies major and maybe a minor in psychology.” And she’s like, “As long as you declare something, we’re good.”
That same year, I learned very casually that there was something called graduate school. Because I wasn’t sure what kind of job I wanted after I graduated, but I loved going to school, I decided to look into graduate school. I was thinking about graduate programs in psychology since I was really starting to enjoy that field. One of the first things I noticed was that you needed research experience to get into most graduate programs, if you were thinking of getting a PhD. I quickly started looking into what research opportunities on campus. I was fortunate that one of my psych professors, Dr. Gabriela Chavira, involved me to join her research lab and mentored me through the graduate application process. She was interested in looking at youth academic achievement, specifically youth of color and other educational disparities and I was really interested in that as well since I have been a GEAR UP tutor.
MSW Online
Would you mind sharing what the GEAR UP program is?
Adriana Aldana
Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP), is either a program that supports educational interventions designed to increase college attendance and success for students in high-poverty schools. But essentially the GEAR UP program matches undergraduate students as teaching assistants within high schools. I served as an in-class tutor for my high school alma mater.
MSW Online
So you participated in this program because you had an interest in helping adolescents succeed, thus leading you towards your future work with this population. Wonderful, please keep going with your academic story.
Adriana Aldana
That still doesn’t get me to social work, but Dr. Chavira’s mentorship led to getting research experience and professional development, which led me to going to a recruitment weekend at the University of Michigan for underrepresented students. At the recruitment weekend, they talk about all of the different programs that they have at the University of Michigan. But it’s also a weekend of just workshops on how to apply to graduate programs generally. One of the info sessions that I attended was on the joint doctoral program in social work and social science. And so for me, I was interested in psychology and social work.
That was the first time that I really thought about social work. What attracted me to even go to that info session was this idea of an applied degree. I would be earning my MSW along the way if I got accepted into the PhD program and I was really attracted to the idea of using research to create community change. I was aware that one can do applied developmental psychology research, but at that time I felt like having a joint degree with social work would get me even closer to what ideally I was starting to shape in my mind: “how do I build a research agenda that isn’t just about generating new knowledge about the experiences of students of color, but is also a research approach that actually creates change or engages young people in creating change?” By the time I left that recruitment weekend, I was pretty certain that I wanted to pursue a PhD in social work and ideally it would be this joint degree in social work and developmental psychology.
MSW Online
Mm-hmm. Sounds like a really complimentary program for what your interests were at the time.
Adriana Aldana
Yes, so I applied to the PhD program at Michigan and got rejected for the PhD, but they said, “We can forward your application to the MSW program if you’re interested.” And I was like, “Well, why not? You know, you already have my application. Yes, go ahead and forward it to the MSW program.” So I got accepted into the MSW program and I had other programs that I had gotten accepted to, but Michigan’s joint program was really my ideal. I decided to enroll in the MSW program and figured I’ll reaply for the joint PhD program in a year. And if it doesn’t work out, that’s fine. I still got my MSW. And so that’s what I did. And it worked out! I reapplied the following year. By that time I had more research experience under my belt, and I also had built some relationships with faculty at the University of Michigan in the School of Social Work and psychology department.
It was in the MSW program that I realized how broad social work as a field really is. Like many people, I grew up with the stereotype of a social worker being a case manager, someone that works with the child protective services, or a clinical social worker. Which wasn’t necessarily my interest. I knew I wanted to work with young people and I was really interested in educational opportunities and how to engage young people in community change. Being in the MSW program and learning through my PhD process, I learned that social workers can be community organizers or that social workers are engaged in policy advocacy and program development. There were broader macro-oriented careers that could be related to social work that maybe aren’t as publicized or pursued.
MSW Online
Right. Would you say your specialty, now as faculty, is still around youth advocacy? Is that something that you still teach or consider your specialty?
Adriana Aldana
I do consider it my specialty. My research now, at the crux of it is, how do we engage young people in community change that advances racial justice? And my most recent publications are specifically around how young people, adolescents, engage in anti-racism and what that looks like, how they define it. My research has also used a youth participatory action research approach, which involves high school age youth both the participants as co-researchers. I think that this type of work reflects my original vision or motivations… To use research as a tool for community change and not just generating new knowledge.
MSW Online
Right. Which is so interesting to hear. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anyone that knew they wanted to do research as an undergrad.
Adriana Aldana
Yeah, I don’t necessarily think I articulated that I wanted to pursue a career doing research at that time. As an undergrad, the juxtaposition of my experience in Chicano studies (looking at the historical and contemporary experiences of Mexican, Mexican American people in the US and how that relates to systems of oppression and cultural assets through a multi-disciplinary lens) in contrast to my psychology courses (where I was learning about human development) didn’t always address issues of inequality. I was interested in adolescence as a stage of development and the experiences the adolescents have in their schools and then their communities. And noticed that in the psychology research of that time there was often research that was supposed to be universal, like this is the experience of all adolescence, but I didn’t necessarily see my experience or the experiences of people who look like me, or the experiences of black people, or indigenous people, in those types of studies. And then when we did read studies that were specific to Latinx people or people of color generally, it often used a deficit model or approach that framed youth of color as falling behind or “at risk.” So the intention is good, right? That we want to make sure no one’s falling behind or no one’s having unequal experiences, but there was always this underlying assumption that young people of color didn’t already have strengths and assets. Noticing these gaps in the literature motivated me to contribute to the academic discourse.
MSW Online
Right.
Adriana Aldana
I saw that there is a space for research to be more attentive to the diversity of experiences of adolescents and to be more critical about the system of oppression, like racism, classism, sexism that are affecting young people’s lives. So I was like, okay, well, if I want to contribute to the conversation about what the experiences of young people of color look like, or the systems that are affecting the experiences of young people, then I need to get the PhD to be able to create those studies that I want to see. At that time, I thought I was going to do that through developmental psychology. It was through the recruitment weekend at Michigan that I was like, “Oh, social work is actually a really closely related profession that I could use developmental psychology research to create the change.” I also knew that most research, especially if it’s not applied research, stays within academia. So students might be reading about it in courses and use it in their papers. You have scholars who are speaking to each other through the literature. But it doesn’t always get applied into practice. And so that’s where I felt like social work could give me that more practical side to merge research with the community change that I wanted to see.
MSW Online
Okay. Oh, that’s so interesting – love that focus on application. Will you share a little bit about what you see the future of social work to be, or needed areas for students as they’re thinking about their career. What’s going to be options for them as they’re getting done with school that is maybe different from what you had or different from now into the future?
Adriana Aldana
Yeah. I think right now we’re seeing more and more conversations about white privilege and institutional racism and social work as a field is being called to revisit its commitment to anti-racism. Where we are in terms of social work education, addressing racism within the field, but also training social workers to be able to think critically about racism and other forms of oppression. And so, I teach in a program where our founding theoretical framework is critical race theory. It aligns really well with my undergrad and graduate training and then my own personal values and missions. And one of the things I’m really proud of our program is for really centering around those histories of people of color that haven’t always been at the center of social work education, but then also helping our students become more racially literate.
What I mean by that is being able to see, understand, explain, advocate in regards to racial inequality and oppression. And that means for us as social workers, being able to interrogate our own privileges and not just in terms of race, but also gender, sexual orientation, and other identities. For students, when I share that I had a very roundabout way of getting into social work, I encourage them to be open-minded and thinking about not just the interpersonal work that happens through case management or clinical practice, but also these broader ways that social workers can create systemic change. So again, social work can also include more macro-oriented practice that may attract students who are interested in nonprofit leadership or management or community organizing or getting into public policy.
These are all fields where we actually need more social workers. But I think because we’re always thinking of social work more narrowly, we often miss out on potential students who don’t necessarily see themselves as clinicians, who like myself didn’t want to necessarily be a case manager.
MSW Online
Last question. Has the university done anything different or have you personally as a professional as a result of COVID?
Adriana Aldana
Well, we definitely had to offer all our courses online. Our field internships, there’s three different options that students have. Some students are doing full in-person internships. Some students are doing a hybrid approach and then other students are doing fully remote and it’s up to the student to decide what kind of field experience they want to engage in. In terms of me personally, I have conflicting feelings about teaching specific social work classes online. The courses that I specifically have reservations about teaching online are the diversity course, my critical race studies class, because so much of that is engaging students in difficult conversations about race, which just have a different feel online.
I am a firm believer that you have to build relationships with people to be able to engage in difficult conversations. And so for me, I spent a lot of time this semester, just creating activities for students to do with each other online, just getting to know each other. Some of that happens naturally for them in class, right? Walking to class or having lunch together, those kinds of things. So having to work around that was difficult. It’s not impossible, but I do still have reservations about it. And I think trying to engage students also, so that I’m not always lecturing. Thinking about creative ways to do either online handouts or simulation games online where we’re all synchronously doing some simulation game or something like that. I had to get creative. In the end, it worked out, but I still prefer in-person for those kinds of classes.
MSW Online
Yeah, I imagine that has been challenging but it sounds like your passion for the material and for the students makes it a wonderful experience. Thank you for sharing your story with us!
Adriana Aldana
Thank you!