CJ Venable, Training and Professional Development Specialist, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

My training is in the foundations of education which brings together humanities and social science in order to better understand the purpose, experience, and effects of education. I use an interdisciplinary humanities-oriented approach to consider the historical context of advising, seek out texts that may speak to the modern dilemmas of higher education, and develop arguments as to how or why advising should be done in a particular kind of way. For example, in my paper “Philosopher-Kings and Academic Advisers: Learning from the Republic” I turn to Plato’s Republic as a text with wisdom for understanding how advisors approach their task. By considering the modern-day invention of predictive analytics systems, I am able to think more deeply about what the role of an advisor should be and how that would play out if we followed Plato’s lead. I use the format of The Republic, the dialogue, as a way to invite readers into my thinking in a conversational way.

This kind of scholarship arose out of a deep, careful reading of The Republic and asking questions like, “What does this mean for education, or for advising specifically?” and “What are the implications of taking this stance?” I also consider potential objections to the argument I make and the challenges of implementing that vision (e.g., how realistic is it to argue that advisors should be involved in curriculum decision-making?). Ultimately this kind of scholarship is deeply textual: it involves reading and re-reading texts to consider their meaning and implications, writing an argument that is then read, re-written, re-read, and re-written again. All the while, one must think deeply about the problem at hand and the argument being made. This humanities-oriented approach allows for insights into not only what is happening or what meaning advisors or students make from their experiences, but what concepts matter for understanding advising and how advising could or should be.

Marc Lowenstein, Former Associate Provost and Dean of Professional Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey

In my work I use the methods of philosophical analysis to investigate questions that are more conceptual than empirical, more about what advisors would ideally do than about what they actually do. For example, in my paper “Academic Advising at the University of Utopia” I explore what an ideal role for advising might be. In “Toward a Theory of Advising” I analyze the way the word “theory” has been used in discussions of advising, pointing out how some of those uses have been misleading. I also propose a theory of advising, a statement of the ultimate purpose and goal of advising and what makes it distinct from other roles. I’ve also written about ethical issues in advising, exploring why ethical dilemmas can arise in advisors’ work, tying this discussion to key ethical concepts advanced by philosophers over the years. An example of this is “Ethical Foundations of Academic Advising” in the (2008) Second Edition of the Academic Advising Handbook.

Peter L. Hagen, Associate Dean of General Studies and Director of the Center for Academic Advising, Stockton University

In my work I tend to write about research methodology in general in academic advising, rather than to use any one particular method to investigate a phenomenon in academic advising. In fact, I prefer the phrase “scholarly inquiry” to “research” because the overtones of the latter tend to summon up approaches to studying advising from social science points of view. I regard the former term as more inclusive, allowing for all modes of inquiry, not only those stemming from the social sciences, but also those stemming from the humanities and even the arts. For example, I was the lead editor in 2010 for the NACADA Monograph Scholarly Inquiry in Academic Advising. In that work we sought to provide insight into not only quantitative and qualitative methods but also ones stemming from the humanities disciplines as well, such as literature, philosophy, and history. Moreover, we looked at epistemology, which undergirds methodology. In my view, to comprehend the whole of academic advising, researchers must have an array of methodologies available to them and they must have at least been exposed to more than just the one epistemology in which they feel at home.

However, I regard the humanities as my home turf. In 2018 I published The Power of Story: Narrative Theory in Academic Advising to try to point the way to using the humanities—specifically literature and film—in conducting scholarly inquiry into advising. This work was heavily influenced by work in hermeneutics by Hans-Georg Gadamer and by a variety of literary theorists.