Change Magazine May/June 2008

January-February 2012

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Building Learning Partnerships

by Marcia B. Baxter Magolda

Educating college students to navigate the complexities of contemporary adult life is an increasingly complex task. Many entering collegians come from highly structured and protective environments and are socialized to depend on authorities for guidance. In a few short years, the college experience must help them learn to take personal responsibility for their beliefs and actions, which amounts to asking them to literally “change their minds”—to go from depending on authority to becoming the authors of their own lives. This challenge disrupts students' emotional comfort, parents' continued interest in protecting their children, and college administrators' eagerness to please students and parents.

Educators who take up the challenge of helping students become self-authoring must have gone through this process themselves. They must be able to envision the growth required for success in adult life; articulate it in the form of learning goals; develop educational practices that effectively support and challenge students to make the necessary mental shifts; and act on this vision despite students', parents', or administrators' resistance to it.

This article focuses on the growth required of educators to promote the kind of development that will enable graduates to navigate life's challenges.

My perspective on the necessity of self-authorship for both educators (faculty and student affairs staff in particular) and college students stems from a 25-year longitudinal study of young adults' learning and development that I initiated in 1986. Beginning with 101 entering undergraduates, I interviewed students annually to explore their learning experiences, how they decided what to believe, how they perceived themselves, and how they related to others.

Eighty students remained in the study through their four years of college; 70 continued after graduation. Thirty-five of these young adults, now in their early forties, still participate in an annual interview focused on the challenges of adult life, how they establish their beliefs and values, how they perceive themselves, and how they relate to others.

Their stories reveal why self-authorship is crucial for success in life after college. For example, Justin described his first post-college job in 1990:

When they gave me this position they just said, “Do it. Go find an office somewhere and create a program.” I just read books and used experiences I've had. I would try to do stuff and it wouldn't work. Then I would know not do it anymore. And then I started making up games to get the kids to play together. It was uncomfortable at first. I was like, “Well, aren't you going to give me some guidelines?” They were like, “We're pretty confident in you.” I struggled for a couple of months because I didn't know what to do, really. And then I started having little bits of success. Then it started building up. I got a lot more confident and a lot more able to try new things. It's really built some self-confidence in me. I learned that I can do it. I learned not to give up on stuff. I've learned to try to open myself up to other people and learn from them. I've learned to look at things people do and evaluate that in my own mind, then make a decision as to what kind of positive things I can take from that and add to my repertoire. (Baxter Magolda, 2001, p. 254)

Justin did not anticipate, nor was he prepared for, this level of autonomy in his first job as a recreational therapist for adolescents. He brought technical skill and experience to his work, but to succeed as an adult he needed to take initiative, direct his own work, and evaluate other people's perspectives. His experience is typical of other study participants, who have encountered similar expectations in a wide range of fields, including business, human services, government—and education.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (2009) use Ronald Heifetz's distinction between technical and adaptive challenges to argue that many current work roles not only require technical skills and knowledge but call for new frames of mind. Traditional workplace virtues such as loyalty, being a team player, and following directions are necessary but insufficient in today's complex and ambiguous work contexts. Kegan and Lahey confirm that contemporary work settings require employees to exercise initiative, personal responsibility, and self-direction. They demonstrate through their work that these qualities are crucial to creating a vision of how an organization should operate, leading in a way that is true to that vision, and managing the complexities of human relations.

Justin had acquired knowledge and skills in college. But as his experience reveals, informational learning, while indispensable, is insufficient for navigating adult work and personal roles. As a college student, he should have experienced transformational learning, the kind that enables us to “negotiate and act on our own purposes, values, feelings, and meanings rather than those we have uncritically assimilated from others” (Mezirow, 2000, p. 8). Cultivating what Kegan and Lahey call “self-authoring” capacities during college would have been less risky than developing them on his own in his job.

How successful is higher education in preparing graduates to be self-authoring? Kegan and Lahey (2009) report that 58 percent of respondents in two major studies involving several hundred participants (which they note were skewed toward middle-class, college-educated professionals) were not self-authoring. Multiple longitudinal studies of college students support their findings that few traditional-age graduating students have developed self-authorship during college (King & Baxter Magolda, 2011).

These same scholars concluded, though, that it is possible to help college students transform from uncritical dependence on authority to self-authorship if educational practice is intentionally structured to provide the challenges and support required for this transformation. Yet unless faculty and staff acquire a new frame of mind about learning and learners, they will continue to encourage informational rather than that transformational learning. This is no easy task: Parker Palmer has repeatedly emphasized that higher education faculty “must possess a rare degree of self-confidence” to take the risks involved in pedagogical change (2010, p. 45).

The processes that enable transformational learning and the development of self-authorship are well known. Constructing educational practice around these processes, however, requires educators to think differently about education, authority, and learning. In short, preparing learners to acquire these complex mental capacities necessitates that educators themselves possess and model them. This article illuminates the capacities required of educators interested in transforming higher education practice and how they can be developed.

CREATING LEARNING PARTNERSHIPS

An extensive literature exists on the pedagogy that helps learners construct their own increasingly complex perspectives, which has been variously called liberatory, empowering, critical, feminist, culturally relevant, and constructivist. Kegan (1994) described it as a developmental bridge that welcomes learners' current meaning-making capacities (and thus provides support) and simultaneously invites them to move toward more complex capacities (and thus provides challenge).

Following my longitudinal-study participants from college entrance to their early forties and synthesizing their experiences in college, employment, and personal contexts that they felt promoted their self-authorship enabled me to develop the Learning Partnerships Model. It includes six specific components:

  • Respecting learners' thoughts and feelings, thus affirming the value of their voices;

  • Helping them view those experiences as opportunities for learning and growth; and

  • Collaborating with them to analyze their own problems, thereby engaging in mutual learning with them. (Baxter Magolda, 2009, p. 251)

These strategies help learners develop their own belief systems and identities. Educators engaged in partnerships with learners challenge them to develop self-authorship by:

  • Drawing attention to the complexity of their work and life decisions and discouraging simplistic solutions,

  • Encouraging them to develop personal authority by listening to their own voices in determining how to live their lives, and

  • Encouraging them to share authority and expertise while working with others to solve mutual problems. (Baxter Magolda, 2009, p. 251)

Unfortunately, the study participants reported that most of these learning partnerships occurred in work or advanced educational settings rather than during their undergraduate years. While some educators have forged such partnerships with students during college in a variety of curricular and co-curricular contexts (see box), these approaches have not yet become mainstream due to the challenge they pose educators.

BECOMING A LEARNING PARTNER

I recall wondering, as I developed the LPM's six components, whether they were merely common sense. But attempting to implement them in my own teaching made me realize that they posed an adaptive challenge. To genuinely share authority with learners, I had to change my way of thinking about learning, my role as authority, and the learners' role.

Learning Partnerships Exemplars

Curricular Exemplars

Integrated Curricular & Cocurricular Exemplars

Co-curricular Exemplars

I originally viewed my pedagogical role as carefully orchestrating discussion to help students arrive at insights I regarded as valuable. Embedded in this view was the assumption that I knew better than they did what insights were important and how best to think about them. When their contributions did not strike me as relevant to my intended direction, I reframed them.

But learning partnerships require abandoning traditional notions of classroom authority. Moving to the new model meant that I had to listen more carefully to students' thinking and recognize that their experiences often prompt different, yet valuable, interpretations of the ideas we are exploring. I needed to relinquish some control to work through ideas interdependently. Enabling learners to develop their personal authority requires me to trust their capabilities, draw out their voices, and link my knowledge to theirs rather than imposing mine on them.

Sharon Daloz Parks emphasizes that adaptive challenges “call for changes of heart and mind—the transformation of longstanding habits and deeply held assumptions and values”(2005, p. 10). This change is difficult and requires support to achieve. I offer three examples here to illustrate the dynamics of this challenge and how colleges and universities can support educators in meeting it.

Virginia Tech: Earth Sustainability (ES) Core Curriculum

In 2003, a group of earth and environmental science faculty at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), led by geoscientist Barbara Bekken, designed an LPM-based core curriculum for first- and second-year students using the theme of earth sustainability (http://www.uccs.ceut.vt.edu/). They did so because they believed that

charting a path toward a sustainable future requires fully self-authored participants who are capable of viewing and applying knowledge in context and who can interpret the perspectives of others in the light of multiple lines of evidence from various disciplines. (Bekken & Marie, 2007, p. 54)

These faculty members recognized the very large challenge they were posing to entering college students unaccustomed to working with multifaceted problems and ambiguity. As the teaching team implemented the design, though, they quickly discovered that they too were facing a serious challenge as educators. They credited their Center for Teaching Excellence for providing consultants and staff time to help them meet it (Bekken & Marie, 2007).

The team—comprising faculty with a variety of disciplines and teaching styles—spent hours structuring class sessions and assignments to link to learners' capacities, evaluating students' work, and addressing tensions that arose among students. Friction also arose within the teaching team, and they used the LPM components to create learning partnerships there as well.

Some components were inherent in the work; team teaching an interdisciplinary series of courses on earth sustainability exuded complexity and eliminated the possibility of simple solutions; it also required a mutual sharing of authority and expertise. But team members' conscious effort to respect each other's disciplinary perspectives, use this opportunity for their own professional growth, and collaboratively solve problems solidified their partnerships. As they aligned their teaching philosophies with the LPM, they transformed their ways of thinking about teaching, learning, and themselves.

A review of students' reflective writing in the pilot courses revealed their increasing ability to recognize assumptions, enlarge their perspectives, and tolerate ambiguity. This led the team to conclude that students were moving toward self-authorship by the end of the third semester of the series (Bekken & Marie, 2007). A more complete study using both quantitative and qualitative measures revealed that students in the ES group experienced significantly more growth than a comparison group in how they thought about their role as learners, evaluated learning, and understood the nature of knowledge (Olsen, Bekken, Drezek, & Walter, 2008).

University of Nevada, Las Vegas: Student Affairs Reorganization

Intent on creating a learning-oriented student affairs division, the vice president for student life at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Rebecca Mills, initiated a major reorganization in 2000. Guided by contemporary organizational-development and transformational-learning perspectives, Mills and her leadership team engaged in a year-long collaborative effort with 16 divisional directors to re-envision and re-structure their work.

A second year of initiatives to translate the vision into practice brought the entire professional student affairs staff into the project. But despite their consistent and intense involvement throughout this process, many of them balked when it came time to implement the reorganization. The leaders realized they had overlooked the adaptive challenge inherent in the reorganization (Mills & Strong, 2004). In fact, the staff members needed to change their minds about students, learning, and their own roles.

Using the LPM model, Mills and her team invited the entire staff to participate in developing common standards that would guide their work and interactions. Over time these conversations yielded agreements about how to work together; a new vision statement for the division; an examination of current practices in light of new goals; and the revision of policies, procedures, and positional responsibilities.

Staff members brought their own experiences and personal authority to the mutual construction of new visions, goals, and practices. This led to an innovative reorganization of various services, as well as shifts in how staff engaged students in leadership and community-service projects designed to promote student learning and self-authorship.

Mills and the leadership team validated staff input by respecting their ideas for reorganization. Over the next year, the leaders reported that despite challenges and setbacks, staff members gained confidence in their ability to solve problems and make decisions, learned to work effectively across their differences, and derived increased satisfaction from their work with students.

This story demonstrates the necessity to support educators in meeting the adaptive challenges inherent in adopting learning-oriented practices.

Miami University: Community of Practice on Engaged Learning

Aware of the role of intellectual and personal maturity in complex learning, in 2006 President David Hodge supported efforts to make engaged learning a driving force at my home institution, Miami University (Hodge, Baxter Magolda, & Haynes, 2009). Educators in multiple units that were experimenting with the LPM merged their efforts and extended an invitation to others interested in similar reform efforts. (For more information on the project, go to http://www.units.muohio.edu/EngagedLearning/; see also the article on this initiative in the September/October 2011 issue of Change.)

This led to a Community of Practice on Engaged Learning (COPEL). Teams from 15 academic and student affairs units joined what turned out to be a two-year learning community focused on revising educational practices in order to promote undergraduates' self-authorship.

As we explored students' development and its relationship to learning, COPEL members quickly extended these insights to their own development as educators. Many of us acknowledged a reluctance to give up long-held teaching and administrative assumptions and practices. We had numerous discussions about the pervasive hesitation to challenge supervisors or senior faculty colleagues by suggesting that reforms were necessary.

Perhaps even more telling were the many expressions of anxiety about student resistance to a new model of education. Some team members acknowledged that they took student dissatisfaction personally. Both new and veteran educators, some with 30 years of experience, shared these concerns.

As we pooled our perspectives and expertise across disciplinary areas and programs within both academic and student affairs, we were able to solve problems that were too big to grapple with alone. By sharing ways to respond to critics, whether colleagues or students, we were able to develop the personal authority to risk innovation. Hearing about similar struggles in multiple campus contexts lent legitimacy to our difficulties in changing assumptions—both ours and those of our colleagues.

At the close of the year, the majority of COPEL members described in their annual reports the changes in their assumptions about learners, teachers, the learning process, and academic/student affairs partnerships. When the COPEL was scheduled to conclude at the end of the first year, participants insisted on continuing, because they considered the community's support crucial to their continued transformation. We devoted our second-year meetings to assisting each team with its reform efforts; these included academic and co-curricular program and course revisions.

Committed to sharing our experiences with others interested in similar educational innovation, we published our stories in a special issue of the Learning Communities Journal (Taylor, Haynes, & Baxter Magolda, 2010). In that volume, various COPEL members described their personal transformations as well as the impact of their reform efforts on students in an integrative studies program, introductory psychology and geology courses, and student orientation.

MEETING ADAPTIVE CHALLENGES

These examples suggest that higher education's relative lack of success in promoting learners' self-authorship is in part due to inadequate support for educators' self-authorship. To what extent do colleges and universities recognize the importance of and support adult growth? What help is available for faculty and staff who want to change long-standing habits of mind and deeply held assumptions? To what extent are they challenged to bring their personal authority to collectively solving complex problems that involve seeing the world and themselves in new ways?

Justin, whom I introduced at the outset of this essay, is now an elementary school principal. In 2002, he had this to offer:

One thing that one group of people wants is something that the other group of people do not want, and I get stuck in the middle because both groups of people are demanding different things of me, so I have to make a decision—what's going to benefit the kids most? …You look at what your goals are and what's going to be best for the kids involved, academically or socially. You look at what the research says and what other people have done, what's worked in the past. And you try to combine all those things to make a decision. People throw up roadblocks, and they try to sabotage things, and then other people will support you the whole way. Sometimes … you don't get that support because people have their own self-interest in mind. They're not really interested in academic achievement of all the kids in our building, like handicapped kids or kids from really low incomes or kids who have a lot of family problems. … I haven't found out yet how I can change that mindset. Helping kids that are struggling is really going to help the whole school, and that will in turn help their own kids. It's going to change the culture of the school a little bit, and then maybe that year that their own kid starts to struggle a little bit, people will care about them a little bit more. (Baxter Magolda, 2009, pp. 342–343)

Justin juggles multiple demands from his constituents by focusing on his goals and the bigger picture: what is best for all the students in his school. His ability to see beyond individual interests and beyond how parents view him is crucial to his success. College educators respond to similar multiple demands.

Scholars of faculty development link educators' development to learners' development. Terry Wildman wrote, for example:

Unless we can envision more effective change processes for faculty and administrators––that is, support their own learning and development––the best prediction we can make about students becoming cognitively mature and secure in their identities and relationships is that they will have to continue working it out largely on their own. In a sense, the shape and pace of their development is dependent on the shape and pace of our development. (2007, p. 16)

Meeting the adaptive challenges they face during and after college is necessary to college graduates' success in navigating adult life. Preparing them do this effectively is necessary in turn for higher education's success in meeting the adaptive challenges of the 21st century. And that is possible if educators engage students in learning partnerships.

RESOURCES

1. Baxter Magolda, M. B. (2001) Making their own way: Narratives for transforming higher education to promote self-development, Stylus., Sterling, VA.

2. Baxter Magolda, M. B. (2009) Authoring your life: Developing an internal voice to navigate life's challenges, Stylus., Sterling, VA.

3. Baxter Magolda, M. B. and King, P. M. (eds) (2004) Learning partnerships: Theory & models of practice to educate for self-authorship, Stylus., Sterling, VA.

4. Bekken, B. M. and Marie, J. Meszaros, P. S. (ed) (2007) Making self-authorship a goal of core curricula: The Earth Sustainability Pilot Project.. Self-authorship: Advancing students' intellectual growth, new directions for teaching and learning, Vol. 109, pp. 53-67. Jossey-Bass., San Francisco, CA.

5. Hodge, D. C., Baxter Magolda, M. B. and Haynes, C. A. (2009) Engaged learning: Enabling self-authorship and effective practice. Liberal Education 95:4, pp. 16-23.

6. Kegan, R. (1994) In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life, Harvard University Press., Cambridge, MA.

7. Kegan, R. and Lahey, L. L. (2009) Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock potential in yourself and your organization, Harvard Business Press., Boston, MA.

8. King, P. M. and Baxter Magolda, M. B. Schuh, J. H., Jones, S. R. and Harper, S. R. (eds) (2011) Student learning.. Student services: A handbook for the profession, pp. 207-225. Jossey-Bass., San Francisco, CA.

9. Mezirow, J. (ed) (2000) Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in progress, Jossey-Bass., San Francisco, CA.

10. Mills, R. and Strong, K. L. Baxter Magolda, M. B. and King, P. M. (eds) (2004) Organizing for learning in a division of student affairs.. Learning partnerships: Theory and models of practice to educate for self-authorship, pp. 269-302. Stylus., Sterling, VA.

11. Olsen, D., Bekken, B. M. and Drezek, K. M. (2008) Teaching for change: Learning partnerships and epistemological growth. Presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.

12. Palmer, P. J. Palmer, P. J. and Zajonc, A. (eds) (2010) When philosophy is put into practice.. The heart of higher education: A call to renewal, pp. 35-51. Jossey Bass., San Francisco, CA.

13. Parks, S. D. (2005) Leadership can be taught: A bold approach for a complex world, Harvard Business School Press., Boston, MA.

14. Taylor, K. B., Haynes, C. and Baxter Magolda, M. B. (eds) (2010) Learning Communities Journal: Special Issue, Vol. 2, Miami University., Oxford, OH.

15. Wildman, T. M. Meszaros, P. S. (ed) (2007) Taking seriously the intellectual growth of students: Accommodations for self-authorship.. Self-authorship: Advancing students' intellectual growth. New directions for teaching and learning, Vol. 109, pp. 15-30. Jossey-Bass., San Francisco, CA.

Marcia Baxter Magolda is Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at Miami University of Ohio. Author or editor of nine books, her scholarship addresses the evolution of learning and development in college and young-adult life, as well as pedagogy to promote self-authorship.

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