Reconstructing Faculty Roles to Align with Self- Authorship Development: The Gentle Art of Stepping Back

Abstract

Student development has connections to important academic purposes in higher education (King, Baxter Magolda, Barber, Kendall Brown & Lindsay, 2009). In particular, a growing body of work on self-authorship, a social-constructive theory of development, has demonstrated relevance to the purposes of higher education (Baxter Magolda, 2001; King & Baxter Magolda, 2004). The conditions which support self-authorship development in academic settings have been studied in detail, drawing attention to what King et al. (2009) frame as developmentally effective educational experiences. Explorations of self-authorship development in academic settings have focused on students’ experiences and outcomes. The classroom experiences of faculty, particularly those working outside institutional initiatives, to support self-authorship have received less attention. This study used a theory-driven (Baxter Magolda, 2001; Pizzolato, 2005), practice-based research framework, to explore a faculty-student affairs collaboration through participant observation as the collaborators sought to align their teaching practices with the tenets of self-authorship development in the context of a senior undergraduate course in Service-Learning. Four themes emerged, which have relevance for those who wish to consider student personal and academic development concurrently. We argue that individual faculty members can collaborate with student affairs professionals and use self-authorship theory to expand their constructions of what it means to be a “good professor” by approaching teaching as a mirror image of the self-authorship journey traveled by students.

Keywords

• faculty-student affairs collaborations
• self-authorship
• student development in higher education
• faculty roles
• teaching methods