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Becky Olive-Taylor on “Developmental Advising”
Becky Olive-Taylor, associate director of academic advising at Elon University, delivered these excerpted remarks at ANAC Summer Institute 2004, June 16-19, at Hampton University. In calling for “developmental advising” as an important student learning experience, she introduced an intentionality to the student advising process reinforced by her advocacy of an institutional advising mission statement. These excerpts from Becky’s Summer Institute talk introduce a breath of fresh air into what are often interminable discussions about whether academic advising is necessary in an era of online registration, how academic advising should be done, and who should do it.
Education involves the orchestration of academic experiences to some identified ends. According to LEARNING RECONSIDERED /NASPA, 2004/ some of those ends involve “fostering cognitive complexity, enhancing knowledge acquisition and application, advancing humanitarianism, engaging students, and developing interpersonal and intrapersonal competence.” College catalogs that are largely descriptions of available courses do not orchestrate academic experiences—people do. Students need assistance in both planning and synthesizing. Students’ experience with college and university advising is not tainted with past high school experience. Instead, their concept of advising is created on our individual campuses through their own experiences with our faculty and staff advisors. What an opportunity we have to introduce students to developmental advising.
Michael Walsh, writing a 1979 article for Personnel and Guidance Journal entitled “Revitalizing Academic Advisement,” offered suggestions that have been echoed once more in the most recent issue of About Campus with Mary Stuart Hunter’s and Eric White’s article entitled “Could Fixing Academic Advising Fix Higher Education?” Twenty-five years later we’re still singing the same song about the need for developmental advising. Walsh interpreted developmental advising as “facilitating the integration of students’ academic goals with their personal, social, and career goals. The advising relationship is dynamic, for growth in one dimension implies growth in the others. The academic self is not a separate entity but in fact is best defined by its interactions with a student’s other selves. Thus advisement involves both students’ internal development (what the students want to become) as well as students’ social development (the relationship of their goals to post secondary education and the world at large.)”
Details of students’ lives cannot be neatly compartmentalized. Students intuitively know this. Revered thinkers in higher education espouse this. We are frequently the ones who “don’t get it” when it comes to actual practice. At it’s most BASIC level, if students are to know and experience developmental advising on our campuses, advisors must learn how to translate a question about course selection (a bureaucratic question) into a question of goals—career, academic, and life goals—by exploring the implications. For example, a student who comes in to discuss whether or not to drop a chemistry class may really need to talk about his fears concerning whether or not he has what it takes to become a doctor. Listening to what a student is not saying is just as valuable as listening to what he is saying. Understanding student development theory and techniques of effective interpersonal communication would serve faculty well. In addition, since students don’t compartmentalize advising/mentoring/interacting, student life personnel are on notice to be aware of institutional policies and academic affairs issues because their interactions with students during organizational meetings are also venues for similar questions. The campus corollary to “It takes a village to raise a child” might be that it takes communication between academic affairs and student affairs to synthesize and integrate students’ education.
Developmental advising is thus a process whose goal for students is self-knowledge. Fulfillment of this goal does not lie in a textbook or book of readings. It cannot be taught, it must be developed. Hunter and White say the challenge is to “create an academic advising system that students, faculty, staff, and administrators view as essential, not peripheral, to the education experience.”
What are characteristics of quality advising programs? Hunter and White address this in their About Campus article. I’ve chosen to elaborate on three of the ten they mention.
The most obvious and often neglected first step is creating an institutional advising mission statement. Advising should mean more than the routine functions of course registration and academic record-keeping. It should also include mentoring and interacting with students in ways that support their growth. For a mission statement to exist in practice, everyone who advises students needs to have some level of input into such a statement. Once agreed upon and written, it still takes time to create an institutional culture that values and rewards developmental advising. Along the way, faculty and staff need both knowledge and skills to competently advise. Technology can free us from some record keeping duties BUT it shouldn’t replace the one-to-one interactions with students. It is important to ask . . What are our institutional goals for advising? Who is directly responsible for the quality of campus advising? AND, how do we hold ourselves accountable?
Secondly, campuses would do well to examine their current structures for advising/mentoring/interacting. Academic advising may happen formally in scheduled appointments and informally after class, in hallways, chance meetings on campus, residence halls, and the like. According to Mark Yudof, Chancellor of the U. of Texas system, “undergraduates have more opinions than knowledge, more passion than experience, more energy than they know how to use, and more curiosity than many older people can comfortably handle.” He muses that “some undergraduates are terrified to ask a question; others boldly ask questions with no easy answers. Some are decisive and try to plan their entire lives, failing to appreciate the serendipity that is unavoidable in the human condition. Some paradoxically choose areas for which they have little facility.” So what structures do we need to support these students in the various curriculums we offer? Do our students enter lock-step curriculums demanding flawless advising to graduate on time? If they don’t, are faculty and staff equipped to handle the inevitable questions that arise from curriculum structure that allows and encourages exploration before settling on a major? Beyond curriculum issues, are our campuses physically designed for faculty-staff-student interactions? Are there enough common spaces in academic, student life, and residence life areas to encourage interaction? If you aren’t sure, take time to ask your students. They will surely tell you.
Finally, institutions must continue to examine how academic affairs and student affairs intersect so that students become beneficiaries of an integrated learning experience. Reporting structures and meeting schedules for these important campus areas should sustain meaningful conversations, accommodate creative planning, and demand formative and summative assessment. Hunter and White note that “as the academy shifts its emphasis to learning outcomes, advising must be part of the equations. It is important to know what students are learning through the advising process and how what they are learning affects their educational experience. Understanding the consequences of advising on student learning can enhance the central role of this activity in the academy.”
In conclusion, whether advising comes from a trusted professor, assigned faculty or staff advisor, or student affairs professional, the ultimate goal is to develop engaged students who figure out how to re-fashion a situation so they gain control. Ideally, developmental advising supports identity development that — while on our institutional watch — includes the power to shape what happens to them.
Panel of first year ANAC member faculty and staff describe their experiences
at ANAC Summer Institute 2004.
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