Putting Students First

Journal of College and Character

ISSN: 2194-587X (Print) 1940-1639 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujcc20

Putting Students First: Creating a Climate of Support and Challenge

Kelly Ward, Lois Trautvetter & Larry Braskamp

To cite this article: Kelly Ward, Lois Trautvetter & Larry Braskamp (2005) Putting Students First: Creating a Climate of Support and Challenge, Journal of College and Character, 6:8,

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2202/1940-1639.1492

© 2006 The Authors

Published online: 01 Nov 2005.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 4141

View related articles

Citing articles: 3 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ujcc20

∗ WashingtonStateUniversity

† NorthwesternUniversity ‡ LoyolaUniversityChicago

Copyright c 2005bytheauthors.Allrightsreserved. http://journals.naspa.org/jcc

PuttingStudentsFirst:CreatingaClimateof SupportandChallenge

KellyWard,LoisTrautvetter,andLarryBraskamp

Abstract

InoursoontobepublishedbookentitledPuttingStudentsFirst:HowCollegesDevelopStudentsPurposefully(AnkerPress),wecallforareinvigorationofhighereducation’scommitment to“putstudentsfirst”byprioritizingaholisticapproachtostudentdevelopment.Thiscallis notunfamiliartohighereducation.Whatisnew,however,arethewaysandcontextsinwhich people—intheoryandpractice—advocateforkeepingthestudentinstudentdevelopmentandfor adoptingofaviewofstudentdevelopmentthatiscomprehensiveandholistic.Inourbook,andby extensioninthisarticle,weusethetermstudentdevelopmenttoincludeafullspectrumofholistic studentlearninganddevelopmentgoalsthatincludesvocational,professional,intellectual,cognitive,social,civic,political,moral,ethical,andspiritualdimensionsaswellasafocusonvalues clarificationandcharacterdevelopment.

Journal of College & Character

VI, NO. 8, November 2005

Putting Students First: Creating a Climate of Support and Challenge

Kelly Ward, Washington State University

Lois Trautvetter, Northwestern University

Larry Braskamp, Loyola University Chicago 1

In our soon to be published book entitled Putting Students First: How Colleges Develop Students Purposefully (Anker Press), we call for a reinvigoration of higher education’s commitment to “put students first” by prioritizing a holistic approach to student development. This call is not unfamiliar to higher education. What is new, however, are the ways and contexts in which people—in theory and practice—advocate for keeping the student in student development and for adopting of a view of student development that is comprehensive and holistic. In our book, and by extension in this article, we use the term student development to include a full spectrum of holistic student learning and development goals that includes vocational, professional, intellectual, cognitive, social, civic, political, moral, ethical, and spiritual dimensions as well as a focus on values clarification and character development.

Research on college students has explored different aspects of this spectrum and more attention has been paid to some aspects more than others. Our work is unique in two ways. One, we focus on the role faculty play in the holistic development of students (in the classroom and out), and, two, we look to the church related college as a place to tease out and learn more about a holistic view of student development. We limit our focus to church related colleges given their mission to revivify the life of the mind by incorporating faith, spirituality, and religion and to prepare students for lives of moral and intellectual complexity. Church related colleges and universities have a history of intentionality about the integration of faith and learning (important aspects of holistic student development) and since these institutions are dedicated to the development of the “whole student,” they provide the types of settings from which we can learn how to both educate students to be well prepared for their careers and lives as good citizens and persons of character (Dovre, 2001, Dykstra, 1999).

Project Overview

The purpose of the book Putting Students First is to share what we have learned about faculty involvement in holistic student development. For the past three years we have been actively

1 Kelly Ward is an Associate Professor of Higher Education at Washington State University. Her research interests are broadly in the areas of faculty work and community engagement. She holds a Ph.D. in Higher Education from Penn State University.

Lois Calian Trautvetter received her Ph.D. from University of Michigan and is Associate Director for Northwestern University’s Higher Education Administration and Policy Program and Lecturer in the School of Education. Her research includes faculty development issues.

Larry A. Braskamp received degrees from Central College and the University of Iowa. Currently he is Professor Emeritus of Higher Education at Loyola University Chicago, where he served as the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs.

involved in the research project, “Fostering Student Development through Faculty Development” funded by John Templeton Foundation and Lilly Endowment, Inc. The initial goal of the project was to better understand the expectations of faculty from the perspective of the chief academic officer (CAOs) of church related colleges to learn more about how faculty are expected to foster student development. Over 250 CAOs of nearly 500 colleges that are affiliated with, associated with, or are members of one of ten church denominations, completed the survey. For complete information about the findings from this aspect of the study please go to http://www.luc.edu/projectfaculty/publications.html.

In the second year, we conducted in-depth case studies of ten campuses to learn more about the role of faculty, staff members, and administrators in guiding students in their development. The ten colleges where we conducted the onsite visits represent diverse institutions. We deliberately selected institutions that reflect different regions, church denomination, size, affinity with the sponsoring church, mission, and level of adherence to a dominant religious or faith perspective. The colleges we visited are: Bethune-Cookman College (Florida), College of Wooster (Ohio), Creighton University (Nebraska), Hamline University (Minnesota), Hope College (Michigan), Pacific Lutheran University (Washington), Union University (Tennessee), University of Dayton (Ohio), Villanova University (Pennsylvania), and Whitworth College (Washington).

Site visits generally lasted two to three days and included interviews with faculty, staff, administrators, and students. In addition, we reviewed relevant documents (e.g., curriculum requirements, promotion and tenure guidelines) and observed campus events (e.g., lectures on relevant topics). We interviewed faculty, administrators in campus ministry and student affairs, and students, as well as the chief academic officer and the president about their roles in fostering holistic student development. We also read relevant documents and attended events to learn more about the campus, its mission, and its approach to working with students. Upon completion of the site visits we compiled our field notes and reviewed institutional documents in an attempt to understand more fully the role of faculty in fostering student development. The book (Braskamp, Trautvetter & Ward, 2006) presents a comprehensive overview of the study and accompanying findings.

The book is designed to inform broad audiences about what it is that we learned about student development in the church related context and as a tool to help all campuses, not just church related colleges, engage in “campus conversations” about faculty involvement in student holistic student development. This article is more narrowly focused. In line with the theme of this special issue—“Finding Wholeness: Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose in College”— this article addresses the question: How does the culture of a campus foster faculty involvement in an approach to student development that supports students in their search for meaning and purpose?

Challenge and Support

In 1968 when Nevitt Sanford wrote Where Colleges Fail: A Study of Student as Person he set out to “help restore the student to his [sic] rightful place at the center of the college’s activities” (p. xiv). Sanford’s focus on student development and a holistic approach to higher education was not new in 1967 and neither is it new in 2005. Sanford (1966, 1968) as a student development theorist is most well known for his development of the concept of challenge and support. Sanford suggested that for student development to occur, the college environment must balance the challenge and support presented to students. Building on the work of Sanford, Holcomb and

Nonneman (2004) call for the same recognizing that “too much of either challenge or support effectively stunts development” (p. 102).

Student development occurs most frequently when the two dominant professional subcultures of the campus—the faculty and professionals in student affairs and ministry — integrate support and challenge. This dual role of support and challenge is especially relevant to the holistic development of students where the goals extend beyond cognitive and skill development into values, civic responsibility, and faith development. Faculty and student affairs professionals play key roles in creating a culture of challenge and support. This culture represents a shift where historically faculty did the challenging and student affairs professionals did the supporting, but holistic student development calls for both of these groups to support and challenge students.

Most of the colleges that we visited consciously address the tension of balancing challenge and support. They do this by helping students develop a sense of self, realizing that students grow in a culture of support and challenge and creating collaborative arrangements intentionally. Pacific Lutheran University sees this dual responsibility of support and challenge as key to their identity, and thus includes it as part of their motto—“support and challenge.” Faculty and staff are in intentional in terms of how they do challenge and support students.

Regardless of how one views the need to integrate support and challenge, everyone—faculty and student affairs professionals—agree that developing students takes time, requires places for students to gather, discuss, and reflect, and learn from and receive feedback from experienced adults (i.e., faculty and staff). Students and campus leaders are aware that asking the big questions in life that involve faith and meaning is not an easy task and cannot be solved by a set of rules and procedures, but it is rewarding and provides new and expanded opportunities for faculty and staff. One faculty member captured the essence of these new opportunities:

Like student-faculty research and working with students on other projects, taking students to another country . . . All the ways in which it’s kind of ‘I can model.’ It’s being that model of full intellectual life and life of personal integrity, but how can I do that along side with my students and allow them to work at this preprofessional level? And that’s kind of given a new cast to all of this –I think that’s fun!

This faculty member sees that he can push students intellectually (challenge) and also work “along side” the students (support).

Those in student affairs are often concerned that the faculty do not see students holistically—that there is more focus on the challenge and not enough on the support. A provost pushes his faculty to see both sides by saying,

You—the faculty—have to be available to the students, outside of class. I don’t think that means telling students what to do. But sometimes I think it means talking with students and reasoning through their options . . . . It means taking time, and in our world, sometimes we don’t take the time.

A central theme of our campus visits was collaboration. In order for campuses to be unified in their approach to student development and to be purposeful in providing a climate of challenge and support, there needs to be a collaborative environment. We identified two aspects of this

collaboration: One, synergy between the curriculum and the co-curriculum, and, two, in relationships between student and academic affairs.

Across the board the campuses in the study were purposeful to carry themes from the curriculum into co-curricular environments (e.g., residence halls). For example, the Hope College Senior Seminar is a capstone core curriculum requirement that calls upon students to articulate a worldview and how this worldview operates in the context of society and the student’s place in society. The classroom aspect of the seminar uses primary texts, short lectures, and small group discussion to help students develop and articulate a worldview. In addition, the seminar requires students to attend local and campus talks as a way to “practice” one’s worldview. Topics that emanate from a guest speaker on campus may be the topics talked about in the classroom, incorporated into the worldview paper, and served as a springboard for out of class discussion. Further, these conversations are likely to continue into the daily chapel experience and residence halls as well. Members of the capstone class have their learning reinforced through curricular and co-curricular experiences. Students find themselves challenged and supported through classroom and out of class experiences.

Another example of a collaborative approach to development that incorporates curricular and cocurricular environment emanates from lectures at Whitworth College on the Iraq War. Given the developments associated with the war, classroom conversations continued to include topics related to the war and whether the war is a “just war” or not. In order to grapple more forthrightly with the topic, faculty staged a debate to discuss the war, and students were able to witness the interaction between two prominent faculty with very different points of view of the war as well as participate in the debate. The debate grew out of class discussions and then returned again later to class discussions. This example suggests a synergy between curricular and co-curricular experiences, and it also shows how students can be challenged in classrooms and then find support to further pursue these challenges in different settings throughout campus. It is often the co-curricular experiences that relate to learning (e.g., study sessions) but that are beyond the classroom (e.g., in a professor’s office) that are most significant for helping students address the “bigger questions” in life. In the words of a faculty member at the College of Wooster: “We cannot separate students’ academic experiences from out of class experiences.” A holistic view of student development calls for a holistic view of the campus and a holistic view of the learning experience.

Student affairs practitioners play an important (yet, often over looked) educational role in student life and are invaluable to creating campus environments that foster holistic student development. The student affairs profession is dedicated to the “development of the whole person” (Nuss, 1996, p. 23), and such development calls for recognizing curricular and co-curricular environments and connections between the two. It also calls for recognizing the importance of collaboration between student affairs and academic affairs. Faculty at Union University talk about synergy between different aspects of student learning and between different aspects of the campus: “We have a dynamic learning community, all working together rather than in isolating units. Students want coherent education,” and at places like Union and other campuses in the study they get it.

Student affairs and academic affairs working together can model how to work together collaboratively and with a community orientation. A holistic approach to student development is likely to be more successful if the different functional areas of academic and student affairs are viewed more holistically as well. Across the board we heard of the desire for more collaboration between academic and student affairs; one administrator referred to the connection as “seamless.”

Collaborative campus cultures are called for to support student development. The bottom line for Pacific Lutheran University was to “stress working together” and “it starts at the top.” Another faculty member at Whitworth College put it this way, “It’s a community effort to educate the students. It requires student affairs and academic affairs to work together in fostering the development of students. It requires a commitment to break out of the silos.” This is not to suggest that tension did not sometimes exist, however, to a campus, the colleges and universities were purposeful and intentional about their desire to adopt a more collaborative approach to student development.

“Keeping students at the center” is a goal that we often heard. Cohesive campus communities are better able to be available for students and to contribute to their development. The “academic alert system” at Hamline is a prime example of how this works. The system involves all offices, including financial aid and residence life, since they see firsthand the interconnectedness of a student’s problem with his or her studies. As one staff person said, “If you keep students at the center of the community it is evident how to structure services for students.” The alert system symbolizes a climate of challenge and support.

What we found from our work in this project is that faculty and student affairs professionals play equally important roles in supporting student development. An administrator at BethuneCookman put it this way: “We need to provide a blend of challenge and support” with faculty and staff involved. This blending takes place by combining the efforts of student affairs practitioners and faculty and by making deliberate connections between curricular and co-curricular settings.

Summary

The culture of support and challenge epitomizes an institution’s mission and identity with the bottom line calling for a holistic view of student development and learning. Campuses can stress the holistic development of students by reinforcing collaboration between academic affairs and student affairs and synergy between classroom and out of class environments. This article only presents a cursory overview of what it is that we found at the church related colleges we visited about their approach to holistic student development and the culture of support and challenge. We invite you to use the ideas put forth in this article as well as in our book to act as a catalyst to engage in conversation with your campus colleagues about how to develop a culture that best supports students in their quest for wholeness and meaning. Crafting such a culture calls for developing “creative tensions” between academic affairs and student affairs, the curriculum and co-curriculum, and the notions of challenge and support.

References

Braskamp, L, Trautvetter, L.C. & Ward, K. (2006, expected). Putting students first: How colleges develop students purposefully. Bolton, MA: Anker.

Dovre, P. J. (2001). The future of religious colleges. Liberal Education, 87(4), 18-23.

Dykstra, C. (1999). Growing in the life of faith. Louisville, KY: Geneva Press.

Holcomb, G. L. & Nonneman, A. J. (2004). Faithful change: Exploring and assessing faith development in Christian liberal arts undergraduates. In J. C. Dalton, T. D. Russell, & S.

Kline (Eds.) Assessing character outcomes in college (New Directions for Institutional Research #122) (pp. 93-103). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Nuss, E.M. (1996). The development of student affairs. In S.R. Komives & Woodard,D.B., Jr., Student services: A handbook for the profession (pp. 22-42). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Sanford, N. (1966). Self and society: Social change and individual development. New York: Atherton.

Sanford, N. (1968). Where colleges fail: A study of student as person. San Francisco: JosseyBass.