Empowering Lifelong Self-Development

Abstract

Academic advisors ancient enough to be fa-miliar with my work, and younger professionals who have chanced upon it, will not be surprised t o h e a r m e a g r e e s t r o n g l y w i t h B u r n s Crookston's developmental view. The following lines from his article remind us of his orienta-tion: higher learning is to be viewed as an oppor-tunity in which the developing person may plan to achieve a self-fulfilling life; that the perspective of work and professional training more properly should be placed within the development of a life plan instead of the cur-rent tendency to prepare one's self for a pro-fession and then build one's life around it. . . . It follows that developmental counseling and advising is concerned not only with a specific personal o r vocational decision but also with facilitating the student's rational processes, environmental and interpersonal interactions, behavioral awareness, and problem-solving, decision-making, and evaluation skills. My position here is that the fundamental pur-pose of academic advising is to help students be-come effective agents for their own lifelong learning and personal development. O u r rela-tionships with students-the questions we raise, the perspectives we share, the resources we sug-gest, the short-term decisions and long-range plans we help them think through-all should aim to increase their capacity to take charge of their own existence. O'Banion says, "the purpose of academic ad-vising is to help the student choose a program of study which will serve him in the develop-ment of his total potential." That's a good begin-ning, but a lot more needs to be learned and considered if we are t o strengthen students' power to create their own futures. He suggests five dimensions: (a) exploration of life goals, (b) exploration of vocational goals, (c) program choice, (d) course choice, and (e) scheduling courses. From my perspective these are neces-sary but insufficient; they a r e good starting points, but we can't settle for just those. How can we help students--of all ages-learn to take charge of their own development? How can we help them become more conscious o f their purposes and talents so they can be more intentional about their own learning? When I wrestle with these questions, it helps m e to use A n n Lynch's Moving In, Moving Through, and Moving On conceptual framework for organizing student personnel services and academic advising. (See Schlossberg, Lynch, & Chickering, 1989, for detailed development of this framework.) This way of thinking about col-lege is also a good way of thinking about enter-ing, moving t h r o u g h , a n d moving on f r o m other significant life experiences; it's a good way of thinking about major life transitions.