Academic Advising: A Discipline of Praxis

Why do advisors do what they do in their advising practice? What challenges do they face in getting from thought to action, from theory to practice? How do they navigate those challenges? What is their process? What is their method? After briefly surveying the landscape of recent literature on the scholarship of advising, this article explores the concept of praxis in general, underscoring the critical importance of a scholarly approach and activity in academic advising praxis. The article mines the topics of the nature of scholarship in general and the ways in which it relates to praxis, offering concrete examples from within the academic advising profession.

Advising Alternatives: A Case Study

Given a rapidly changing labor market, advisors use parallel planning and alternative advising to teach students adaptability. Whereas parallel planning proactively prepares students for future transitions through considering multiple pathways, alternative advising occurs after students fail to make degree progress or secure admission and, consequently, must change their goals. This article integrates research that can help frame an advising curriculum, pedagogy, and learning outcomes as well as a case study that demonstrates such learning outcomes as coping with loss, managing anxiety, and restoring self-efficacy. Through the process described, students discover hope, resiliency, and a renewed focus on their goals.

The Interpretive Turn: It's Our Turn

This is the text of the keynote address for the 2018 NACADA Annual Conference in Phoenix, Arizonia. The author discusses two main epistemologies in academic advising research and practice, and argues that both positivist epistemologies and constructivist epistemologies should be available to practitioners and researchers.

Advising the Law: Academic Advising in Law-Generating Institutions of Higher Education

Academic advisors occupy an ethically fraught position in institutions of higher education and frequently have to traverse complex curricular issues. Legal theorist Lon L. Fuller's work provides advisors with new resources to ply some of these troubled curricular issues. By focusing on understanding colleges and universities as law-generating institutions, advisors can reshape how they think about the nature of their work so that, in a lawyer-like fashion, they can then subject the rules created by these institutions to Fuller's ethical standards. Analyzing such rules via Fuller's standards can help advisors to navigate better their often ethically fraught institutional position and aid them in advocating for rules that are fair to students and that maintain the integrity of institutional rules and decisions.