Keeling and Hersh (2012) explain as colleges and universities move toward a focus on increased graduation rates and meeting students’ expectation to “get me a job”, we forget what should be primary to our existence and purpose in society: helping students learn. While graduation rates and job placement numbers matter, are we satisfied that students enter society without some of the basic skills they should have learned under our guidance? Many of our graduates lack essential skills. Does college/university really accomplish what the world needs it to?
Student affairs needs to ask the same question: if we cannot prove that students learned as a result of our programs, what value do we have?
We are at a point when all we do should be about learning. We should not just hope it occurs. Keeling and Hersh (2012) tell us this. Guiding documents of student affairs tells us this – in fact, in a recent essay, Jim Barber and I explain that while not always first on our mind, learning has always been a byproduct of good work in student affairs. In the ACPA/NASPA Student Learning and Development competency, at the basic level, we are expected to “Identify and construct learning outcomes for both daily practice as well as teaching and training activities”.
What else do we need to hear before we’re just being negligent about our work in student affairs? Why are people still not prioritizing learning? Why don’t we use language that more meaningfully connects what we do to learning? Why don’t we view our role as educators? Really, why has this been so hard?
It’s hard because we can’t see or feel learning as much as we can see a student happy with her residence hall experience or relieved after we’ve provided her with counseling services for stress management. Student affairs folks like happy – that’s not a bad thing – but when we see her happy we can also meet our other obligation by asking her (in some way) what it was she learned as a result.
What will it take for you to prioritize learning? If you already do, what are the strategies you use to infuse learning more strongly into your work?
A focus on SE is a laudable goal, and likely a more practical handhold than self-authorship in terms of what student affairs professionals should reach for.
That said, self-efficacy is itself broad and complex, and invites the same plausible but immeasurable conceptual rationalizations that we find in most student affairs learning outcomes. Yes, struggling with a conduct related experience can help a student learn about their impact on the community, but there are many things they can learn and what they learn is impacted by what they bring to the learning experience, including their self-efficacy. While conceptually possibly, there are many other possibilities in terms of what the student might learn, and we have no way of discerning what was actually learned. The conceptual rationalization is rather week when considered in a more critical fashion.
Self efficacy involves elements of motivation, attribution, metacognition, and more. In order for us to hang our hats on Self-efficacy, we need to understand its components and be able to apply those components at the individual level. For example, when working with a student on a conduct case, we would need to recognize what their attributions tell us about their self-efficacy in the context of the goals that led to the behavior in question, and employ more empowering experiences as sanctions. To make those experiences effective, we would to understand the mechanisms of motivation within them. We tend to focus on the community impact and not the individual’s goals that directly led to the behavior, and rarely do we consider motivational theory in that process.
Thus, self-efficacy can be a very useful construct in our efforts, but to produce in any meaningful difference in terms of our impact, we must move beyond a superficial understanding of it and apply that understanding at the behavioral level rather than the conceptual level.
Good thoughts Stan. I have copied and pasted this under the self-efficacy post so people can read.