Advising is Teaching II

My response to Ken's item #6:

As Ken notes, in the early days of the college precepting was considered teaching and there was some workload credit given for it. It was supposed to be more significant than the kind of advising we now do. Yet, while there may have been considerable opportunity for providing the student with a unique experience, one wonders, again, whether this was felt by all students equally. The freshman would have gained a great deal more from the precepting experience than the transfer student. But, perhaps we should say, that was the benefit of coming to Stockton straight away and not stopping at a community college for two years. Perhaps this needs further articulation, as we endeavor to make it clear to the transfer student what they need to accomplish at Stockton – and it needs to be part of a strong Transfer Seminar program.

Isn’t it interesting that we have a freshman seminar and a freshman year experience, but really do not have the same thing for transfer students. What is the reason for this? – It is about retention and engaging students immediately so that they don’t leave and go to another institution. And these things work well. We don’t worry about transfer students so much, because they will be taking the fastest route through the college and it is unlikely that they will leave us. No worry – no services!

But it is nonetheless true that, from the perspective of inculcating values, it is perhaps more important to reach the transfer student than the freshman. The latter has a longer period in which to imbibe the spirit of the college; he or she has a greater opportunity to experiment; heck, he or she gets his or her own freshman seminar! By the time they reach their junior year, we hope that they have experienced our G courses, and that they have been taught to question and articulate their own ideas. Meanwhile, the transfer student is experiencing a much more traditional education – a continuation in many respects of the approaches he or she was encumbered with in high school. Listen and repeat, listen and repeat; know facts, don’t think about interpretations. We only get the transfer students at Stockton for two to three years – perhaps we should spend more energy trying to help them to more quickly learn what we think college should be all about.

But I digress. An extreme understatement, since I am supposed to be talking about Precepting. So let’s find our way back, if we can –

It seems to me that precepting is more important than we give it credit for being. We have shrunk it down to advising for the major, and we assume that all students understand what these majors are and how they should achieve success in them. We have created a Banner system that allows students to go through their careers advising themselves, more or less. Where precepting used to be compensated, there is now no support for faculty who do the job well. We talk about advising being teaching – but the bottom line is that we pay for teaching while we don’t pay for advising. What do we expect?

Even if we now advise, where we might have precepted before – and we might want to consider the Wilsonian and Princetonian origin of the latter term and therefore its potential elitism – we should be endeavoring to build an advising system that is course and workload based. I only have the haziest notion of how this might be accomplished at the moment, but I think we need to tie it more firmly into the curriculum. Since the majority of our students are transfers and since they are more program based than the four-year students (and given that the four-year students will have received a mentoring through the freshman seminar system), we should perhaps privilege the transfers in our thinking and tie to each major an advising course that begins in the second year and is linked to the capstone courses (e.g. the thesis). I worry that we may lose some interdisciplinarity here, but if we get a robust Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies, located in the office of advising, we could perhaps revive the whole advising process at the college.

That’s my second plug in one night for this new/old Stockton degree.