Entering Academic Advising

Primary-role academic advisors come to the field from a wide variety of social, academic, and vocational backgrounds. There are likely a wide variety of ways in which these advisors are socialized for the work of academic advising and in the larger community of practice of advising. However, advisors’ professional identity development is under-studied, and this lack of understanding is an impediment to the emergence of advising as a profession. This article presents findings on professional socialization from a larger collaborative autoethnographic study of advisor professional identity. We present a collaborative analysis of our reflections on becoming primary-role advisors which includes nine interconnecting themes in an emerging substantive theory of advisor professional socialization. Though it is not generalizable, our model is a proposal on which future research can build.

Advising Pre-Dead Students

Academic advising, to be “critical,” must be emancipatory. I argue that the task of critical advising today is to liberate students from the dominant conceptualization of higher education as pre-professional schooling in order to open them up to humanistic exploration and to help them make their education meaningful on their own terms. Inspired by Cornel West’s idea of going to college to learn how to die, I introduce the concept of “pre-dead” students to argue that the task of critical advising is to help students move from a premature professional narrowness to a maturation of the soul. Using Burns B. Crookston’s theory of education for human development, I argue that the task of critical advising is to open up students to self-examination by way of a deep, disciplined humanistic education that many students avoid, often due to parental, social, and economic pressures that push them toward premature professional narrowness. I develop my approach to critical advising in contrast to Andrew Puroway’s overtly political Frierian-inspired approach. I also offer some practical advising strategies and examples of how advisors can help students open themselves up to the life-changing study of the humanities.

Advising for Sustainability: A Challenge

Our society needs sustainable solutions to unprecedented and interconnected environmental, social, and economic problems. Advisors must join campus colleagues who are incorporating sustainability into institutional operations and curricula by engaging in “advising for sustainability.” This article first provides practical ways to take advantage of the unique opportunities offered to advisors by recommending and discussing academic options related to sustainability. It also interrogates advising’s teaching function and suggests that, by adapting critical pedagogy to our advising practices, we can engage in reflective advising conversations that probe our institutional complicity in global environmental crisis and urge our students to interrogate their behaviors and goals to embrace more sustainable ones.

From the Editors-in-Chief

We want to thank our editorial team for making this issue a possibility, and for all of the submissions we received from our authors. Without them, this inaugural issue would not be possible.

A Conceptual Framework for Disruptive Innovation in Advising

Institutions of higher education seek innovative opportunities to keep up with changing student needs. Accordingly, frameworks such as Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation theory may appear attractive on the surface to improve advising practices, but a deeper under-standing of context and objectives is imperative to recognizing the applicability of such frame-works to practice. By clarifying what Disruptive Innovation is, and is not (i.e., sustaining innovation), it has been argued that the theory has been misunderstood and misapplied (Christensen et al., “What is Disruptive Innovation?”). A closer look reveals that in addition to benefits, the Disruptive Innovation framework also poses a number of challenges to advising. This study sets out to (1) clarify the theoretical framework of Disruptive Innovation and explore the relationship between Disruptive Innovation and advising; (2) examine the extent to which Disruptive Innovation theory can be applied in advising, via a case study; and (3) discuss the implications for Disruptive Innovation in advising.