ABSTRACT
This essay examines the convergence between enduring ideals enshrined in the American tradition of general education that many faculty members endorse and the learning-centered approach to academic advising. In light of this convergence, and in response to the notion of “advising as teaching” advocated in the literature on academic advising, I call for restructuring of some faculty roles, responsibilities, and rewards; course and curriculum redesign; ongoing professional development; and a creative approach to institutional planning that will allow more options for careers in college teaching. This will enable at least some faculty to rebundle their scholarly, instructional, and mentoring roles in ways that are professionally more satisfying and better for student learning in general education.
General education more than any other part of the curriculum is where American higher education most clearly articulates its highest aspirations—the very aspirations that in many ways set the American tradition apart and make it attractive for students from around the globe. Surveying the learning goals of general education programs across the nation one finds fairly consistent mention of such laudable ideals as fostering a capacity for independent thought and action; developing an awareness of ethics and facility with ethical reasoning; instilling a commitment to social responsibility, citizenship, and the public good; appreciating and engaging constructively with diversity in a global society; synthesizing and applying knowledge to address societal problems; making connections and developing an expanded and more complex understanding of the world and one's place in it; becoming a lifelong learner; and helping students to develop meaningful and purposeful lives (see American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2011). In many general education programs, these more lofty and transformational learning goals provide the larger context and rationale for the more practical academic skills and broad cultural exposure that such programs also address on most campuses. Yes, we want students to learn to think critically and to communicate and count effectively. And yes, we want them to know a bit about the practice of science and the other academic disciplines. But we also typically want students to apply the intellectual skills and broad exposure to the disciplines that they achieve through general education courses in the broader context of their lives as “autonomous human beings” and “responsible citizens” (Ginsberg, 2011, p. 176).
For example, in my own religious studies courses that are part of general education, I typically ask students to analyze and think critically about important issues; to understand, appreciate, and engage with diversity; and to connect learning to their own lives as both private persons and global citizens. Going beyond memorizing information about the world's religions, my students must identify the existential import that the issues and “big questions” we study have for those who are committed to a particular religious tradition or school of thought. They must also explain the chains of inference and reasoning that lead different thinkers to their conclusions. And they must develop and defend their own cogent case (in writing) on the same issues addressed by the thinkers we study, including some reflection on the existential import of the topic (or lack thereof) for themselves. In their persuasive papers and exam essays, I often require students to include a serious rebuttal to the argument they present, and I ask them to provide a thoughtful response to that rebuttal. Throughout my teaching career, I have emphasized precisely those higher-order reasoning skills and persuasive (typically written) communication skills that concern Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift. Importantly for what follows, I do not feel unique in this regard. On the contrary, it is pretty routine stuff. This is the practice that my own teachers and mentors modeled and that I simply picked up from them.
Additionally, and again following the example of my own teachers and influential faculty colleagues, my courses encourage students to step imaginatively out of their familiar cultural worlds and appreciatively into the often very different realities and priorities of religious and cultural “others.” Guided by the observation that religion matters a great deal to a great many people and by the concern that religious differences and misunderstanding often contribute to conflicts and injustices, through my teaching I seek to mitigate religion's power to divide. This goal counters what William James (2009) called “a certain blindness in human beings”: the tendency to overlook the meaning that things have for others who are different, to miss the way that those others love and cherish things that to us may seem useless junk.1 Again, none of this is unique to me.
Moreover, by enabling students to think critically and by exposing them in compelling ways to the power and beauty of alternative paths that important religious figures and movements often take, I strive to empower my students to pick up and shoulder the freedom to create their own identities. I want them to strike out on their own path guided by their own reasoning, evolving values, accumulated experiences, and sense of higher purpose. I want them to understand and respect others, of course, and I want them to assume responsibility for the communities they inhabit, but I also want them to be independent.
Of course, one might argue that all of this is well and good but primarily relevant to the liberal arts and humanities disciplines such as religious studies, where larger ethical and existential concerns are at the forefront. Other areas of the curriculum such as the professions must cover a minimal amount of content knowledge and technical skills demanded by accrediting bodies and licensing exams. These professional demands allow less room for the larger goals of personal meaning, autonomy, and responsible citizenship that are so prominent in general education programs and the liberal arts.
No doubt individual disciplines and individual courses do differ in this regard, to some extent. That is why the curriculum is an articulated reality, with different parts emphasizing different learning goals across general education and the major as well as the curriculum and the cocurriculum. It does take a campus to properly educate a student.
At the same time, as Anne Colby, William Sullivan, and their colleagues in the Carnegie Foundation's Preparation for the Professions Program point out, much more than technical skills training and specialized knowledge is required of a successful professional.2 Sustained success in the professions also requires wrestling with many of the same questions and acquiring many of the same attitudes, values, and broader intellectual skills that are traditionally associated with liberal learning and general education.
For example, according to Sullivan and others, professional preparation necessarily includes developing and refining a student's commitment to ethics and public service. This is not only because the professions have internal codes of ethics that practitioners must follow but also because the professions command a high degree of public support and claim a significant degree of autonomy to regulate and police themselves independent of public authority. These claims are based not only on training, expert knowledge, and skill but, more importantly, on the given profession's claim to exercise expertise and skill in the public interest and to use it first and foremost to meet genuine human needs, not simply for private gain.
Furthermore, professional competence properly understood includes skills at communicating effectively, collaborating in cross-professional teams, and appreciating diversity among colleagues, customers, clients, patients, and constituencies. It also requires learning how to transfer insights from one situation or context to another analogous situation so as to continuously learn from experience and develop practical clinical judgment. Integrated and applied learning and the ability to synthesize are important in translating technical knowledge and experience into the practical judgment needed to problem solve under the demands of particular circumstances. Without these more general and “transferable” skills and habits of continuous lifelong learning, the aspiring professional cannot practice effectively, at least not for very long. In addition, in order for practitioners to contribute to the advancement of the profession by suggesting better ways of understanding and accomplishing the profession's fundamental goals, they need the kinds of critical- and creative thinking skills and commitment to evidence-based reasoning that most colleges and universities seek to impart to all of their students through the general education program as well as the major.
Finally, Sullivan and his colleagues point out that professional work may well be one of the last remaining places in the modern economy where a thoroughgoing interpenetration of personal and professional identities is desirable and where a genuine sense of vocation is possible. Professionals are expected to hold themselves to common standards of “quality work,” and they are encouraged to achieve a high degree of integrity, where the values, goals, purposes, and standards of the individual align with those of the profession. This alignment is part of what makes professional work highly meaningful for the dedicated practitioner and a source of identity and personal fulfillment. For these reasons, an education that makes room for existential questions, self-exploration, clarifying one's values and sources of meaning, and discovering one's passions and sense of purpose is just as important (if not more important) for students majoring in a professional track as it is for the liberally educated humanist.
Admittedly, it is tempting to be cynical about these high aspirations for student learning in general education and the professions. The higher education literature is correct in pointing to the problems that make the work of undergraduate education even more challenging and sometimes less rewarding than it might otherwise be under different economic, social, and cultural conditions. Admittedly, as well, there are different types of colleges and universities that serve a diversity of students and that hire and reward different kinds of faculties and professional staff. Undoubtedly, some institutions are more suited than others to undertake the kinds of teaching and engagement with undergraduates I am evoking.
Still, when asked, a remarkably high percentage of American faculty members across all institutional types express deep and enduring support for the traditional goals of liberal learning and general education. In particular, “critical thinking” comes in for near-universal approval, as do communication skills. Nearly all of us in higher education appear to agree that students ought to graduate with the ability to think critically and to write clearly (Arum & Roksa, 2011, p. 35). Surveys suggest that many prospective employers are of the same mind (Hart Research Associates, 2013, pp. 1–8). Large numbers of faculty and other university staff as well as many prospective employers also point to the importance of teaching students to recognize, appreciate, and navigate cultural diversity. And the entire enterprise of higher education arguably rests on the assumption that students take what they learn in school and transfer it to their work and lives beyond campus. This assumption, combined with the idea that students develop in stages and move from lower to higher levels of intellectual development, suggests that accumulating deeper knowledge and mastering skills require students to connect and transfer learning from one assignment, course, or experience to others in a learning progression. Therefore, some ability to synthesize learning across disciplines, across general education and the major, and between the curriculum and the cocurriculum is needed.
In this context, it is significant that those faculty voices most at odds with current trends in higher education, those who decry the “fall of the faculty” and the “rise of the all-administrative university,” evoke the production of “autonomous human beings” and “effective citizens” as the truly unique and defining contribution, along with knowledge production, of the traditional faculty-centered university (Ginsberg, 2011, p. 176). In short, when times are hard and faculties are pressed back upon their fundamentals to justify themselves and their claims to shared governance, what we typically get are the high-sounding aspirations most closely associated with and most explicitly articulated in our general education programs. No doubt there is a bit of unreflective habit and even self-congratulatory hype involved here, but also a measure of sincere professional commitment and existential self-understanding of the sort that Colby and Sullivan identify as characteristic of true professions.
If you have followed me this far, I assume that you are persuaded (or at least hopeful) that there is worthwhile and engaging work still to do in our colleges and universities around teaching in general education. Armed with that assumption, we can ask how we continue to get the work done under the changing circumstances of the twenty-first century. Despite the familiar litany of daunting challenges, how will we not only continue the American tradition of nurturing “autonomous human beings” and “effective citizens” (and, I would add, well-prepared and civically minded professionals) but deepen and enhance it?
More specifically, how will we get more of our students to remember more of what we teach them in one class or on one occasion long enough and deeply enough for them to integrate current learning across time and with future learning opportunities so that they develop and grow in understanding, breadth, depth, skill, and experience? How will we help students integrate their knowledge across disciplines, general education, the major, and the cocurriculum, so that cumulatively, they construct a more complex and coherent view of their education, their world, and their place in both? How will we help more students find meaning and purpose in what we teach them, such that they engage, take more initiative, and actively connect their evolving values and sense of personal purpose to their college-level learning, careers, and roles as citizens?3 How will we help more students understand how to apply their learning to responsibly address societal problems? How are we going to help more students understand these larger goals we are trying to accomplish on their behalf so that they at least understand and appreciate the larger point of our efforts, even if they do not always assign the same value and priority? How will we encourage students, once they become citizens, to value the public university or their private alma mater enough to support taxes and make contributions that sustain the work of higher education?
I struggled with these questions for years first as an instructor and then again as an administrator tasked with promoting undergraduate student learning and academic enhancement. In my instructional role, my horizon was local, and my approach was mostly anecdotal, based on conversations with colleagues and reflection on my own experiences and the occasional article forwarded by friends around campus. Through the broader horizon opened up by my administrative role, however, I was introduced to the bourgeoning national discussion about improving undergraduate education, particularly student learning in general education.
It was in the broader context of the national discussion that I first encountered the innovative thinking currently coming out of certain academic advising circles, particularly as it concerns the notion of “advising as teaching” and a “learning-centered” approach to advising that promotes students' intentionality and responsibility for directing and applying their own learning. While I served as an academic adviser earlier in my career, I had not kept up with the most recent developments in the advising world. And what strikes me about these current conversations among professional advisers is the convergence I notice between some of my own cherished goals as an instructor in the humanities and the goals of academic advisers who are exploring a learning-centered philosophy of academic advising. This convergence and its implications are what I wish to address in what follows below.4
A good example of the trend is found in Marc Lowenstein's 2011 article entitled “Academic Advising at the University of Utopia.” In this article, Lowenstein outlines the elements and core ideas behind a “learning-centered advising system” and philosophy that has been adopted at the University of Utopia—not a real advising system in place at a real university, of course, but an exercise in utopian literature designed to explore the merits of an idea by describing what its ideal implementation might look like. If we like what we see, Lowenstein argues, then maybe the core ideas will seem worth further consideration. Three key ideas are at work in Lowenstein's essay. They are “reflection,” “integration,” and “intentionality,” meaning that students construct a meaningful purpose and intentional direction for their studies and for their lives beyond college by continuously reflecting on and integrating their college experiences in several ways.
First, students at the University of Utopia (UU) are encouraged to discover and develop connections among and between the topics, skills, and disciplines they study in the curriculum. How, in short, does the curriculum fit together as a coherent whole? Instead of simply taking courses and “checking them off” one after another out of obedient conformity to what is required and sequenced for them by the university, UU students are asked to more carefully identify what a given course is really about and how it relates to and builds on other courses they take. They are asked to spell out the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they are meant to learn in each course; why they are asked to learn those things; and why the courses in the curriculum are placed in a particular order by the faculty—what, in short, the “logic of the curriculum” is (Lowenstein, 2000).
Linkages are also examined between the curriculum and its application to the world beyond the classroom and the campus. How might the knowledge, skills, and attitudes taught in the students' course of study be applied in the worlds of work, society, politics, and personal life? How do the ideas and learning experiences they have encountered at the university help them to understand the world and their place in it? How does their education prepare them as citizens? How does it prepare them for meaningful work and a career? Do the students have an accurate grasp of the kinds of work and work environments their educational path is leading to, and are they preparing adequately for the academic and other rigors of that path? UU students are also asked to think more broadly about what they could do with what they are learning and how that might be broader and wider and more transferable than what the students previously imagined. Students are asked to consider that multiple careers and life paths might be equally possible from any given course of study. They are alerted to the idea that there is nothing necessarily automatic about how a major links to a career; rather, students must actively construct the link for themselves. Life is made, not found.
Perhaps most importantly, UU students are asked to reflect on how their learning relates to their own personal values, to their evolving sense of purpose, and to their personality, aptitudes, and abilities. All of these linkages and especially the exploration of personal values and sense of purpose help to facilitate students' ongoing and active construction of a meaningful educational experience that is leading to an individually and personally meaningful life. In short, students learn to tell a story of where they began, how they grew and learned over time, what their learning has meant to them, and what they want to do next (or perhaps better, what it makes sense for them to do next) given the learning they have so far mastered.
Importantly, UU students tell this story prospectively as well as retrospectively. They begin to make more self-directed and intentional choices about their future course of study based on their past learning experiences. All of this is achieved by having students reflect on their college experiences and academic work and by capturing that work and their reflections in an evolving portfolio that is required across every student's academic career at UU. The portfolio is discussed regularly with the student's academic adviser, and the adviser also assigns important elements to be included in it. The aim of the adviser is to foster students' self-awareness, to help them develop a coherent academic identity and character, and to be a sounding board that guides and provokes them as they fashion a life-shaping narrative that provides a sense of personally meaningful direction—more than a major, indeed.
For Lowenstein, much more than informing students about academic regulations and helping them register for courses, the real task of academic advising is to facilitate students' ability to integrate and use their studies to create personally meaningful and autonomous life narratives. According to Lowenstein and others who think like him, helping students identify and name what they are learning in their courses and in the rest of the college environment at a “deep” level, helping them understand how the curriculum and the cocurriculum can fit together into a coherent whole—knowing the “logic” of the curriculum—and applying these insights to both academic and life planning are all teaching functions. But they are teaching functions that academic advisers are especially well positioned to carry out, provided that institutions give them the institutional support and resources to function in this way.
Connected to all of this is Lowenstein's suggestion that especially designated adviser-teachers be assigned to teach dedicated “Reflective Learning” courses and that all students be required to take these courses for credit across their entire academic career at UU. In these courses, students build and gradually complete their portfolio as a series of credit-bearing assignments, and they must discuss those assignments with their academic adviser-teacher and revise them based on feedback.
Lowenstein also recommends (and rightly, I think) that these adviser-teachers hold an advanced degree in an academic discipline and that they keep an adjunct appointment of some sort in an academic department. After all, if advisers are to help students understand the logic of the curriculum in terms of the deeper kinds of learning and life transformation it offers, they will need a deeper familiarity with and passion for the academic offerings than can be gleaned by reading the typical university bulletin and schedule of courses or acquired by studying the current theories of learning, education, and student development, as valuable as these might be. Above all, they will need a practitioner's firsthand familiarity not only with the content of the curriculum but, more importantly, with the passion for questioning and discovery that feeds it. And they will need to know firsthand about what is involved in the art of authentically teaching and conveying a discipline and its animating passion if we are to graduate the next generation of knowledge producers and problem solvers and not simply produce graduates who are well “schooled” (i.e., skilled at navigating through the school as an institution).
Of course, in addition to a solid grounding in an academic field, the type of adviser-teacher Lowenstein envisions will also benefit from having at least some of the knowledge and skills characteristic of good coaches and good counselors. To engage students or anyone else in serious and open-ended reflection, writing, and conversation about their personal traits, desires, values, and dreams and to engage them in exploring the personal meaning of their experiences and choices requires the ability to open others up, and that in turn requires the ability to build and keep trust. Teacher-advisers of this type will need to know how to ask open-ended questions. They will need to gently probe and encourage and at times to challenge. Some knowledge and skill at disarming fear and apprehension, building confidence, challenging defensiveness and avoidance, and motivating and encouraging others to face hard questions and difficult choices will be needed. They must also be active and empathetic listeners, patient, and able to convey genuine investment in a student in order for students to develop and share authentic answers.5
Functioning as part coach, part counselor, part instructor, and part disciplinary scholar, as well as managing the more traditional aspects of academic advising such as course registration and helping students negotiate the university environment, is a tall order, to say the least. And yet, artfully integrating all of these components into a singular professional role seems best for student learning, at least so far as achieving the most important outcomes associated with the American tradition of general education and effective professional preparation is concerned. What seems to emerge here is the outline of an important professional practice that bundles (or perhaps more accurately, rebundles) functions once collected into an earlier understanding of the faculty's teaching role—functions that were largely “unbundled” during the course of the twentieth century. Higher education in America seems once again to be groping for a way to institutionalize and accomplish all of these important elements of the traditional practice of undergraduate teaching. Teaching at its best has never been a simple matter of dispensing expert knowledge, as Ken Bain has recently demonstrated in his widely acclaimed book What the Best College Teachers Do (2004).
Obviously, much in the current landscape of higher education gives one good reason to pause before embarking on any proposed “reform” of the likes Lowenstein outlines. Current discussions of undergraduate education (and especially general education) evoke an array of concerns and challenges. Students are not staying in school, we are told, and they are not graduating in the expected time frame and numbers. Increasing numbers of student are attending several different institutions of varying types, taking some of their requirements online and some face-to-face at different schools and at different times in their lives, with little continuity or connectedness. Even if they persist and graduate from a single institution, it is unclear that today's undergraduates are learning all that much. They are sometimes described as mere “consumers” of educational commodities who are “obsessed with credentials,” “academically adrift,” “without purpose,” and overly engaged in the social dimensions of student life (Arum & Roksa, 2011, pp. 59–89).
Adding to the situation, faculty members and administrators are often wary of each other's motives. Traditional tenured faculty express understandable concerns about their declining numbers and waning influence over institutional priorities, while administrators complain that too many faculty are out of touch with today's students and institutional realities and overly concerned with highly specialized research programs at the expense of undergraduate teaching.
Additionally, and to complicate matters, college costs are seen as spiraling out of control; financial aid is not keeping pace; student debt is rising precipitously; and critical stakeholders such as parents, employers, the federal government, and state legislatures are increasingly concerned about the finances and value-added of higher education. These concerns lead to mounting demands for greater accountability and efficiency, followed by what some see as greater intrusion into the affairs of academia, threatening academic freedom. In recent decades an overall decline in public support and state appropriations for the nation's public colleges and universities seems to be doing more to exacerbate than address the problems.
The listing of current challenges and concerns could easily go on, and the cost of expanding the role of academic advising along the lines envisioned by Lowenstein and others surely raises questions for many, if not all, institutions. For example, the addition of required “Reflective Learning” courses taught by specially trained adviser-teachers might address concerns about coherence in the curriculum and student accountability for self-directed learning, but this solution runs the risk of adding credit hours and time to degree completion at a time when pressures are mounting to reduce the number of courses and credits and to decrease time to a degree. And there is the expense of staffing such courses, especially if all students are required to take them every year that they are in college, as Lowenstein proposes in his utopia. Even if the number of Reflective Learning courses were reduced, say, to a first-year course and a senior capstone, still, a very large number of sections would be needed; and additional adviser-teachers would need to be hired and trained to offer them, or a significant repurposing of existing professional staff and faculty positions would seem to be required, or both, to accommodate all of the students.
Nonetheless, as Lowenstein suggests, if you like the way things look at UU, then there is at least an incentive to engage seriously with the core ideas behind his proposal. And I suggest that those who value undergraduate teaching, general education, and the American tradition of fostering students' lifelong autonomy, effective citizenship, and workplace professionalism have good reasons to like what Lowenstein's utopian university is doing. Someone, it seems, needs to do it. It is a valuable and time-honored practice among American universities, one consonant with an older approach to college teaching that many tenured faculty members are finding it increasingly difficult to carry out under current conditions, even as they recognize that these learning outcomes constitute the unique contribution of a faculty-centered university (Ginsberg, 2011).
Again, we are led back to the contours of an enduring professional practice. It is a complex practice requiring theoretical knowledge, experience, keen observation, and skill. It is a practice that yields important questions for scholarship and research that can feed back into and enhance the practice. It is also a practice worthy of passion and dedication and requiring lifelong learning. At the same time, it is a practice experiencing an unsure fit with the institutional arrangements that have historically carried and sheltered it, one where practitioners are increasingly torn between their highest ideals and the day-to-day realities and requirements of their institutional roles and settings.6 This is a situation that requires an institutional and structural response, and Lowenstein outlines one important and promising structural response that moves us past the hand-wringing and toward thinking constructively about new organizational possibilities. Others are needed.
In this vein, what I find particularly appealing about Lowenstein's depiction of learning-centered advising at the University of Utopia is that it avoids any further unbundling of the disciplinary, instructional, mentoring, coaching, and advising elements of good teaching and meaningful education, at least insofar as that would entail dispersing those functions among multiple and distinct occupational roles and institutional settings that are further removed from each other and from the core academic mission and work of the faculty. We would do well to follow Lowenstein's direction by seeking new structures and roles in the academic departments and Academic Affairs more generally that effectively rebundle and reintegrate the traditional aspects of good teaching and that bind them more closely to the university's academic core. Following Lowenstein and the movement for learning-centered advising, we need to keep students' self-exploration and discovery of passion and purpose and their academic planning and preparation for a career meaningfully engaged with and informed by the knowledge, wisdom, big questions, skills, and cultural models embodied in the university's required curriculum and the disciplines that feed it. We need to do more to better communicate the rationale behind the required courses, especially in general education. We need to find more and better ways to help students retain, connect, transfer, and apply learning across courses, through time, and between students' academic lives and the rest of their lives. We need to saturate undergraduate education with more occasions and opportunities to reinforce the learning we intend for our students, and we need to connect with students and interact with them in constructive ways that build relationships, establish trust, and encourage their engagement with the learning opportunities we offer to them. Lowenstein is correct, I think, that all of this is academic work and good teaching practice.
And like Benjamin Ginsberg and others who write with understandable alarm about the decreasing numbers of faculty and the decline in faculty influence and governance, I believe that efforts to reform and enhance the undergraduate learning experience ought to begin with the faculty more often than they do and that they need to say more about the need for more faculty members. Where I hesitate is around the question (not much entertained in The Fall of the Faculty) concerning what kind of faculty and with what skill sets, aspirations, and incentives. I realize that many traditional tenure-track faculty and senior Academic Affairs administrators maintain that the best college teacher is also an active researcher and scholar in his or her area of specialization. So be it, but that does not address the question as to whether such a faculty member is institutionally positioned and enabled to teach in the way suggested by Lowenstein's adviser-teacher. Nor is it likely that traditional faculty will receive much in the way of encouragement and support to move in the direction of a more robust understanding and practice of teaching and to refine their interpersonal relationship-building skills in the ways needed for the kinds of coaching, mentoring, and advising that this more robust understanding entails. I doubt it, and therefore I doubt that much progress toward a more integrated, purposeful, and meaningful learning experience, particularly in undergraduate general education, will likely come by simply adding more traditional tenure-track faculty to the ranks and running them along the same tracks we have had in place for several generations.
On the contrary, unless the tracks faculty members are allowed to run on become more differentiated along the lines of what Lowenstein imagines for adviser-teachers and unless attention to teaching, mentoring, coaching, and advising students as whole persons and active collaboration with colleagues across disciplines and with professionals in the cocurriculum become significant and normal parts of at least some faculty members' institutional positions, adding more traditional tenure-track faculty will produce limited results.
In addition to imagining and creating new kinds of faculty positions, some attention to course and curriculum redesign and associated professional development for those who teach on a campus are also needed. Unless more of the courses that are required in the regular disciplinary curriculum (especially general education courses) are designed to include opportunities for communicating and discussing the larger rationale of the curriculum, and unless more space is allowed in class assignments for students to reflect on and integrate their learning and to reflect on their sense of purpose and meaning, simply adding more staff, calling them “teachers,” and including them in the ranks of the faculty will be insufficient. Nor will it be sufficient to add dedicated “reflective learning” courses. As previously mentioned, with limited budgets and increasing pressures to reduce credits and time to a degree, many institutions and degree programs will simply not be able to offer such courses in sufficient numbers to get the job done. It is an option for some, perhaps, but not all and probably not most.
Therefore, a more efficient and sustainable approach might be to embed more activities and assignments that require self-reflection and integrated and applied learning in more of the courses already in the curriculum. We need to make the search for coherence, meaning, and purpose more a part of how we teach in a wider array of undergraduate courses by asking students to reflect on the application, value, and significance of their learning for themselves, the disciplines, and the diverse societies they inhabit.7 Lowenstein (2011, pp. 5–6) touches on this point when he suggests that at UU, the line between what goes on in advising settings and what happens in the regular classroom gradually becomes much less distinct. Moreover, to be fully effective and successful, this kind of curricular reform will also benefit from exposing more faculty and future faculty to the knowledge, insights, and skills associated with counseling, coaching, human development theory, experiential learning, and cognitive psychology. All faculty, not just the adviser-teacher types, would benefit by being reminded that teaching of all types is inescapably a social relationship. To be successful, as in any relationship, building rapport and trust will go a long way, and there are strategies and techniques for doing so that faculty members of all stripes could benefit from knowing and using.
Having listened for years to faculty members complain about disappointing performance in their capstone courses and in their upper-level clinical settings, and having struggled myself with the frustration and disappointment that inevitably come when students resist my best-intentioned but individually isolated efforts to implement more active, engaging, and self-reflective pedagogy, I believe that fostering greater intentionality, purpose, and deeper learning will require that we give more attention to integrating the overall institutional learning environment. The learning environment as a whole, not only individual courses and faculty roles, needs to be structured in ways that ensure that the most important lessons and the most demanding pedagogy are validated, reinforced, and deepened across multiple learning experiences rather than forgotten or contradicted (see Weimer, 2002, chap. 6). Doing all of this while ensuring that students remain the active, engaged, and responsible parties is important. As Lowenstein rightly points out, learning portfolios that span multiple courses, stages, and even institutions in a student's academic career are one promising approach.8 Learning communities that cluster students and that integrate learning across multiple courses and the curriculum and cocurriculum are another.9 Interdisciplinary team teaching and community-engaged teaching that includes reflection by the students on their learning experience are still others.
My suggestion, then, is to reinforce and extend efforts such as Lowenstein's that reimagine faculty and adviser roles by intentionally connecting them in robust ways to course and curriculum redesign, faculty hiring and professional development practices, graduate school preparation, and wider institutional planning. Deeper, more coherent, and more meaningful student learning and a fuller realization of the traditional ideals of American higher education most likely lie in this direction. Moreover, and happily, it is interesting, challenging, and meaningful work. A life lived in pursuit of such goals has the makings of a meaningful vocation. The task is to create more places in academia for those who seek this kind of work.
NOTES
I owe the reference to James (and much more) to Dr. Henry Samuel Levinson, whose sage advice and example continue to exercise daily influence on my thinking and teaching.
This discussion of the needs and demands of professional education draws extensively from a series of publications produced under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Preparation for the Professions Program. The program conducted a series of research studies on professional preparation in the seminary, law, medicine, and nursing from 2005 to 2011. Together with past foundation president Lee Shulman, Senior Carnegie Scholars Anne Colby and William Sullivan coordinated the studies and their subsequent publication in a book series. For the remarks here, see in particular Benner & Sutphen, 2010; Sullivan, 2005. See also Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, & Damon, 2001.
For a discussion of the connection between motivation to learn and connecting to students' personal sense of purpose, see Schunk & Zimmerman, 2007.
For background on the “learning-centered” approach among academic advisers, see Hemwall & Trachte, 1999; Lowenstein, 2000; White & Schulenburg, 2012.
For an extensive treatment of effective practices for interacting with students in the advising as well as the instructional setting, see Bloom, Hutson, & He, 2008, and the companion volume, Bloom, Hutson, He, & Robinson, 2011.
For an extended discussion of the concepts of “alignment” and “misalignment” in the professions between deeply held and formative ideals, on the one hand, and the institutional arrangements that support a given profession, on the other, see Gardner et al., 2001, pp. 3–14. For a similar discussion of the potential for conflict between social goods that are “internal” to a practice and social goods that are “external” to it, see Stout, 1988.
For examples of teaching in the disciplines and majors that incorporate self-reflection assignments on students' values, sense of purpose, and motivation and other strategies for fostering intentional learning, see Carey, 2012; Cholbi, 2007; Francis, Mulder, & Stark, 1995.
For an extensive discussion of the use of different types of portfolios that emphasizes the potential of portfolios to enhance deeper student learning, see Zubizarreta, 2009.
The literature on learning communities and their effectiveness in promoting integrated learning is extensive. For example, see Kuh, 2008; Levine Laufgraben & Shapiro, 2004; Shapiro & Levine, 1999; Smith, MacGregor, Matthews, & Gabelnick, 2004; Soven, Lehr, Naynaha, & Olson, 2013.
