The First-Year Experience Movement: Redefining University Socialization, Study notes of Education Planning And Management

Download The First-Year Experience Movement: Redefining University Socialization and more Study notes Education Planning And Management in PDF only on Docsity! 9 ABOUT CAMPUS / SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2003 wHEN JOHN N. GARDNER JOINED THE FACULTYof the University of South Carolina in 1970, the collec-tion of offerings that would become known as the first- year experience did not exist. Over the next three decades, Gardner and his colleagues succeeded in shifting higher education’s attention to the experience of first-year students and, more recently, to the experi- ence of all students in transition. Charles Schroeder spent some time with Gardner recently, asking him to turn his experienced and critical eye on the educational estab- lishment he has worked for more than thirty years to change. Here is what he had to say. CHARLES SCHROEDER: Your name is synonymous with the first-year experience.What was the catalyst that prompted you to devote most of your life to this aspect of under- graduate education? JOHN GARDNER: It was a phone call, an invitation from a university president who cared enough about younger developing faculty members to invite them to partici- pate in certain types of innovative efforts to rethink undergraduate education. I’d been at the University of South Carolina [USC] for two years, minding my own business, teaching history to beginning college students. In July 1972, a month after Watergate, CHARLES SCHROEDER TALKS TO JOHN GARDNER The First Year and Beyond o 10 ABOUT CAMPUS / SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2003 Thomas F. Jones, president of USC, invited me to a workshop, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was about.A little over two years before he had been barricaded in his office during a student riot, which led him to put together a faculty–student affairs committee to study the causes of the riots. But he got impatient with the progress of the committee deliberations and came up with the idea that the key to preventing future riots was to restructure the whole socialization process of bring- ing students into a major research university. He wanted to develop a process to redo the first year and teach stu- dents to love the university rather than be angry and trash it. SCHROEDER: I know our readers are aware of the signif- icance of the first year and all the positive changes that have occurred over the past two decades. In your judg- ment, has the first-year experience come of age? GARDNER: I probably need to define first-year experience in order to answer your question.When we first started using the term in 1982, we didn’t offer a definitive meaning and use for it, so people started using it how- ever they wanted. In my use, the term meant a national and international effort to improve the first year, the total experience of students—and to do this intentionally and by rethinking the way the first year was organized and executed. Many other people in higher education thought the term meant a particular type of program or intervention for first-year students, most notably the first-year seminar concept with which I’ve been associ- ated. But the concept of the first-year experience, how- ever it is defined, has been in the lexicon now for twenty years, and our research has found dramatic increases in its use and in all of its potential applications. So I would say there’s no question that this way of thinking about undergraduate education has definitely matured and become institutionalized to varying degrees across the four thousand or so postsecondary institutions. SCHROEDER: In recent years we’ve certainly seen more attention given to advising and a proliferation of first- year seminars, and we’re now seeing at least one-fourth, perhaps one-third, of first-year students involved in some kind of learning communities, and we are seeing a lot of Supplemental Instruction.Are there additional challenges that you see in terms of helping to realize the full educational potential of the first-year experience? GARDNER: There are many additional challenges. How much you value and are willing to invest in education for first-year students has always been an issue that cam- puses have faced, but it has become more difficult given the enormous economic constraints that many of us now face. I believe that institutions always find the money to do what they most value, so the question is, What do we most value? For many campuses, doing the foundation year well may not be a high priority, partic- ularly when you have decreasing resources. So one basic challenge is simply to maintain the resource base. Beyond that, many of the initiatives you just summarized have been efforts to change the first year by going outside of or around the faculty.When American higher education wanted to improve academic advising, what did it do? It went out and hired thousands of professional nonfaculty advisors, and it founded a professional organization that represents many faculty but also a disproportionately far greater number of nonfaculty professional staff adminis- trators. Many of the first-year seminars have been launched and sustained with disproportionately greater uses of staff than faculty.This is understandable; when you want to change a campus, you go to those areas that respond most immediately to change, and they may be Has the first-year experience come of age? There’s no question that this way of thinking has become institutionalized to varying degrees across the four thousand or so postsecondary institutions. John N. Gardner is senior fellow and distinguished professor emeritus of the University of South Carolina and executive director of the Policy Center on the First Year of College. He can be reached at gardner@brevard.edu. Charles Schroeder is professor of education at the University of Missouri–Columbia and a contributing editor of About Campus. We love feedback.Send letters to managing editor Paula Stacey (pstacey@josseybass.com), and copy her on notes to authors. Your First College Year, which is a joint project with UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. I believe you also have a couple of other assessment initiatives under way—a national benchmarking survey and a first- year data audit tool kit.Will you tell us a little bit about these initiatives and how they can be used to improve the first-year experience? GARDNER: They grow out of three grants that we, the Policy Center on the First Year of College, received to develop some new tools and procedures for assessing the first college year. I want to stress that it’s the first college year because we have been trying to get campuses to develop a better understanding of the whole of the first- year experience, both the curriculum and the cocur- riculum.We have developed the national benchmarking survey First Year Initiative in collaboration with the for- profit firm Educational Benchmarking, Inc., to evaluate the first-year seminar. First-year seminars have been around since 1882, but there has never been a nation- ally produced, readily available instrument to evaluate the effectiveness of these courses, which are now found on 80 percent of the baccalaureate campuses and 62 percent of the campuses of two-year community col- leges. We’ve finished our second year of administering the First Year Initiative, a tool developed by my col- league Randy L. Swing, at eighty-five schools, and we’re very encouraged by the first year’s results at sixty-two institutions. Each institution picks five peers against which to benchmark.You don’t know the scores of the other five institutions, just the aggregate scores and your scores. So there is nothing competitive about this, which we expect will produce more genuine motivation and broader participation. Some thinking about what we call the pedagogy of engagement has emerged from the first survey. Swing found that the seminars most highly rated by students are those that are most likely to use what we are calling engaging pedagogies. This takes us back to the behavior of the instructor as opposed to the behavior of the student. We are also finding that the seminars thought of most highly are those in which student lead- ers play a key role, and we find for the first time some pretty persuasive evidence that students rate more highly courses that have at least two, preferably three, hours of credit as opposed to the one-credit model.This is very important because the one-credit model is the most common. My hope is that the evidence we are produc- ing will encourage colleges to do a better job of train- ing their instructors to use more of these engaging pedagogies and to give serious consideration to increas- ing the amount of credit to at least two and preferably three hours per term, and perhaps even over multiple terms. The second instrument, the Data Audit Tool Kit, is a project we undertook with the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.This was ini- tially the brainchild of Peter Ewell, their senior scholar, and I sort of leaped on it and suggested that we collab- orate.The tool kit teaches colleges how to extract more and better data from their existing sources and then syn- thesize the data to create a more complete picture of what’s really happening to their first-year students.We are approaching colleges and universities with the assumption that they already know what they need to know about their first-year students and about how that knowledge is related to student success—but they just don’t know they know it. In other words, they have the information but don’t know where it’s found and how to get it. Most schools are not going to make serious changes in what they do for first-year students without some form of evidence, and this is a further effort to try to produce more evidence to help bring about change. SCHROEDER: So all three of these tools—Your First Col- lege Year, the First Year Initiative, and the First Year Data Audit Tool Kit—really can help institutions improve and create even more innovative ways to connect with first- year students. GARDNER: That’s right.They’re all designed to improve assessment of the first-year student experience, with the hope that you then use that information to actually make decisions.This is the heretical notion that you’d actually use assessments to bring about educational improvement. SCHROEDER: Let’s shift to another kind of heretical notion, which I think is becoming more accepted: the 13 ABOUT CAMPUS / SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2003 Many colleges and universities are run like the American corporation: they want a quick financial return and are not thinking twenty, twenty-five years out. 14 ABOUT CAMPUS / SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2003 emphasis not so much on teaching but on student learning.You’ve been a strong proponent of the Student Learning Imperative [SLI, published in 1996 by the Amer- ican College Personnel Association].What do you see as the current status of the SLI? Also, how would you char- acterize the state of academic–student affairs partner- ships in relation to student learning? GARDNER: I’m glad you asked me this because it is something I’ve been increasingly concerned about. I am a tremendous fan of the Student Learning Imperative. I think it made a tremendous amount of sense. It painted in concise, understandable, and clear language a com- prehensive and thoughtful picture of where and how learning takes place and how learning can be more effectively achieved if faculty and student affairs officers work together to pursue a more holistic approach to student learning. I think the strategy was necessary after the last recession, during which many student affairs positions were cut, and I saw a lot of attention to SLI between 1994 and 1998. Since then, unfortunately, it has just dropped off the screen.When I’ve asked people if they are using SLI, I get these great big blank looks. I think that student affairs folks have abandoned a valu- able intellectual tool, and I frankly haven’t seen anything else they have produced that could replace it in terms of intellectually viable substance.When I reflect on this, I see that my student affairs colleagues have been major partners and agents for change with respect to how we think about undergraduate education; but quite uniquely, the intellectual leadership is provided by peo- ple who aren’t in student affairs.That is, a number of seminal thinkers and scholars of higher education have developed a body of theory that is put into practice by student affairs officers rather than having student affairs officers develop both the theory and the models for practice. Many, if not most, of the leading thinkers for the profession are very near retirement or have already retired, and I’m concerned about where the next gen- eration of intellectual leadership in student affairs is.The failure to make the most out of the Student Learning Imperative further signals to me that there is a funda- mental problem. On some campuses I see student affairs units that are working hard to rethink, reorient, restruc- ture themselves to be firmly focused on the learning mission. But on other campuses it’s as if this attention given to student learning and the Student Learning Imper- ative never happened.We are still into running housing for housing’s sake, and activities for the sake of activities. I don’t know why they don’t get it. SCHROEDER: In light of your concerns, are there some implications for the preparation programs? For exam- ple, the master’s programs that are designed to form young student affairs educators? Are there some things that need to be done at that level? GARDNER: I question whether the most appropriate preparation route for student affairs professionals is or should be the terminal degree in education.When I see the way the system is now working, and the enormous cultural divides that exist between the way student affairs professionals think and the way faculty think, I have to ascribe some of this to their training. Frankly, I think that many of the student affairs professionals I’ve known would have been just as well served had they stopped with a master’s in college student personnel administration and then earned a doctorate in a tradi- tional academic discipline.They would have been able to teach, to hold some type of faculty appointment, and they would have learned to take a more analytical approach to matters. Now, I know it’s more complicated than that—a lot has to do with personalities and with the nature of their undergraduate experiences—but I am just not persuaded that the advanced degree in edu- cation is serving many of these people when they actu- ally get into the profession. SCHROEDER: Given the need for student affairs folks and academic affairs folks to work cooperatively and indeed collaboratively to create a more seamless first-year expe- rience, what kind of institutional leadership is needed to make this a reality? GARDNER: Clearly this has to start with the chief exec- utive officer of the institution. For the kind of integra- One reason that so many of the student affairs units got clobbered during the last recession and will get clobbered again this time is that the key decision makers saw them as being so separate and therefore less important. tion we are talking about, the president of the univer- sity or the college has to insist on integration and true collaboration.This is a challenge because the majority of American college campus leaders are people who never used student services. In the 1950s or 1960s in most American colleges, other than the few big research universities, there just weren’t student affairs officers. There were no financial aid offices prior to 1965 and there weren’t any career centers. It will be some time before we get more people moving into the ranks of CEO-level jobs who experienced an environment that was shaped in some meaningful way by the input of stu- dent affairs professionals. For much of the past half cen- tury, the argument has been that we are going to be better off if we have a totally separate student affairs division reporting to a vice president who reports directly to the president. I am not persuaded any longer that this is the most effective model. SCHROEDER: So would placing student affairs under the provost be one strategy to increase integration and coherence? GARDNER: There is no question that there would be more integration if everything passed through academic channels. One reason that so many of the student affairs units got clobbered during the last recession and will get clobbered again this time is that the key decision mak- ers saw them as being so separate and therefore less important.That created a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we are feeling the consequences today. SCHROEDER: Let’s shift gears.We’ve been talking about the first-year experience, but you’ve been a strong advo- cate all your life for the senior-year experience.Tell us a little bit about its current status:What is going well, and what needs to be done in terms of addressing unfinished business? GARDNER: More and more educators are realizing that the two key windows for capturing data on students for assessment purposes are when they enter college and when they leave it.You need to know about them when they enter so you’ve got a baseline against which to measure what you’ve done for and with them as they leave.And I think the assessment movement, thanks to the accreditors, has encouraged more attention to be paid to the senior-year transition.As educators became increasingly interested in the first year, they recognized a lot of similarities between the first year and the last year, and that many of the strategies we have been developing for the first year might also help pave the way for a successful transition out of the university or college. I’m talking about partnerships between faculty and student affairs officers, special seminars on transition issues, much more integration of career planning, ritual and ceremony for arriving and departing students, and efforts to build enthusiasm for the institution as students arrive and as they depart. In addition, colleges need to be more successful in cultivating alumni because of the decline in state appropriations and the realization that we are going to be continually more dependent on dis- cretionary gifts from our alumni. So more attention is being paid to the senior year and there has been a renaissance of interest in the medieval practice of the capstone course.These courses are labor intensive and very expensive, but colleges are realizing that you need to provide the most empowering, introspective, reflec- tive, intellectual experiences for your departing students or they are not going to think much of you as they walk out the door. I have to say, however, that it is a lot harder to sell college and university administrators on invest- ing in the senior-year initiative than in the first-year ini- tiative because they don’t see an immediate return of financial resources from the investment in the senior year. Many colleges and universities are run like the American corporation: they want a quick financial return and are not thinking twenty, twenty-five years out. But there are institutions saying that if we provide a certain experience for a student when he or she is twenty-two years old, we’re more likely to receive major gifts when they are fifty-two. SCHROEDER: You and Betsy Barefoot recently founded the National Policy Center on the First-Year of College at Brevard College in North Carolina.What is its pur- pose and what are some of the major projects you are sponsoring? 15 ABOUT CAMPUS / SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2003 If we provide a certain experience for students when they are twenty-two years old, we’re more likely to receive major gifts when they are fifty-two.