Postmodern View of Advisement in Higher Education

Abstract

American higher education and its academic advisement practices are founded on the modernist notions of rationality, prediction, and control. The postmodern perspective, which has evolved in the last three decades, suggests that the modernist perspective has become too limiting. This article briefly reviews the modern-postmodern debate and introduces the postmodern concept of chaos theory. Characteristics of chaos theories are used to evaluate contemporary academic advisement from the theoretical perspectives of modernist and postmodernist advisement.