Patricia M. King: More particularly, what constitutes development, meaning not any change is developmental, not all growth is developmental, and there are strict criteria for that, that emphasize the, um, seeing the world more complexly and with more adaptability. So when we say what constitutes development, we’re using the, um, prior theorizing and research to identify that. But once you’ve identified it, like, how does it evolve? What are the personal, um, characteristics that interact with, um, different contexts? Um, really trying to, um See the unders- underlying assumptions more, more fully.

Heather Shea: Welcome to Student Affairs NOW, the online learning community for student affairs educators. I’m your host, Heather Shea. Today, I am so excited to be joined by three scholars whose work has shaped the field of college student development and higher education. Together, they are the authors of a new book, Exploring Complexities in College Student Development: Critical Lessons from Researching Students’ Journeys.

In the book, they draw on years of research and hundreds of student stories to challenge some of our traditional assumptions about student development, offering a more nuanced understanding of how students learn, grow, and make meaning of their college experiences. Their work invites us to embrace complexity and rethink how we support students in an increasingly dynamic higher education landscape.

Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in, alongside, or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays, and you can find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com.

Today’s episode is sponsored by the Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership. Evolve offers four leadership coaching journeys designed to expand capacity and build capabilities, empowering courageous leadership to transform institutions and reimagine the future of higher education As I mentioned, I’m your host for today’s episode, Heather Shea.

My pronouns are she, her, and hers, and I am broadcasting from the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabe, Three Fires Confederacy, Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi peoples, otherwise known as East Lansing, Michigan, home of Michigan State University, where I work. Let me bring my guests onto the screen.

Welcome everyone. I’m gonna read just a really brief bio. And I’m so excited to jump into our conversation today. So first, let me introduce our guests. Dr. Patricia, or Pat King- Hi. Hi … is Professor Emerita in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

Pat’s scholarship has helped generations of educators better understand student learning, development, and reflective judgment, and her contributions have shaped the foundations of student affairs practice and research. Welcome, Pat.

Patricia M. King: Thank you.

Heather Shea: And next, Dr. Rosie Perez, Rosemary Perez, is Associate Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan as well.

Her research explores college student development and success, identity, equity, and belonging, with a particular focus on how students navigate complex educational environments and experiences, and how institutions inequitably support students’ development and success. Welcome, Rosie.

Rosemary J. Perez: Good to be back.

Heather Shea: And Dr.

Jim Barber. James, I think is your full name. Everybody has a nickname on this episode today.

Jim Barber: That’s right.

Heather Shea: So Jim is Professor of Education and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Programs at William & Mary. His work focuses on student learning, liberal education, and educational environments, and he has spent much of his career studying how college and universities foster student growth and success, as well as integration of learning.

Pat, Rosie, Jim, thank you so much for joining. I’m excited about today’s conversation. So before we dive into talking about the book, I’d love to have you all share anything else beyond the bio I just read and maybe something about how this positions you in this work. So Pat, I’ll start with you.

Patricia M. King: Thank you for that introduction. I think the only thing to emphasize there is the the addition of emerita in my- … in my title. That it’s the transition to retirement has been long and enjoyable. So this book was really a culmination of- … so many threads of interest and co- and people to work with and projects to undertake.

So it’s really fun to have the chance to try to pull some of the pieces together for the audience today.

Heather Shea: I love it. Thank you so much, Pat, for that. Rosie, how about you?

Rosemary J. Perez: Yeah. It’s probably helpful to know that I was a student affairs educator for many years before joining the team that ended up working on this research project.

Actually starting as a first-year doctoral student. Oh. So I’ve worked on on this project on again and off again pretty much throughout my academic career. And it’s informed a lot of my work. Since then I’ve been doing a, a lot of longitudinal projects, including the Promoting at Promise Student Success project, which is a research practice partnership.

So a lot of my work is grounded in relationships with participants, but also with practitioners.

Heather Shea: I love that work. Out of the Pullias Center at USC? Yes. Amazing. Jim, welcome.

Jim Barber: Thank you so much. My story is very similar to Rosie’s. I was also gonna mention that I started my career as a student affairs professional working with fraternities and sororities, res life.

And my involvement in this project as a, a doc student researcher is really what changed my trajectory from a, a student affairs practitioner to a student affairs faculty member. And so for me, this has been one continuum of a career working in both student affairs and academic affairs.

Heather Shea: I love it.

It’s always interesting to me how people come into the field and then find their way- … into different spaces and places. And I’m always grateful for faculty who’ve had some practical experience. I think that, that is super helpful. So Pat, let’s talk a little bit about the study.

If you’re, if folks are not familiar with the Wabash National study the, the book draws upon 1,000 interviews with 315 students over four years. Tell us a little bit about that. And I, then I’d love to know what motivated you to revisit the data set now, and what makes this book different from other work that emerged from the study?

Patricia M. King: I’d like to start with the motivation to undertake such a huge project. And like many big projects, the source of the motivation was frustration.

And it was frustration that existing theories of college student development were based predominantly, if not exclusively, on the experiences of white people, especially men.

This was more true in the early days of theory building, but still true in terms of large scale longitudinal national projects. They remain few and far between, but important work has been done. And that at the time, no large scale longitudinal projects had materialized to address the problem despite numerous people, calling for that work to be done and identifying the problems of basing a lot of work on theories that were so narrowly constructed.

Further, so many of the theories tended to overlook or de-emphasize the role of contextual factors affecting development. And this is common. I think the same is true for people who study context, that there’s little attention to the individual characteristics, where those who look at individual development tend to de-emphasize context.

But the problem with this literature in particular is that it led some to assume that deficit mindsets, such as blaming the student for insufficient developmental progress, had undergirded developmental theories in general and/or that they were simply had no relevance for minoritized students.

Discussing this problem, my colleague Marsha Baxter Magold and I really worried that the value of developmental theories was being dismissed or underestimated and would be lost without attending to the critiques and conducting more inclusive s- studies. So we had what I like to call a put your money where your mouth is moment when special funding was awarded to Wabash College and we had the opportunity to become involved in what became the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education.

This was designed as a multi-method study. The coordinator for the quantitative part was Ernie Pascarella, the late Ernie Pascarella actually now. And Marsha Baxter Magold and I coordinated the qualitative portion of the study. So we had a lot of motivations and background experiences, and simply really didn’t wanna continue to be part of the problem, and then this opportunity to move that forward.

So the purpose of the study most simply put, was to explore the development of self-authorship and the development and the emergence of liberal arts outcomes. It was, after all, a study funded to look at liberal arts education, to do so at varied collegiate contexts and using a diverse sample. So the– Let me just briefly say the institutional sample.

There were six colleges or universities involved in this. No, they weren’t all liberal arts colleges. But they were different institutional types. The four liberal arts colleges, two of which were single gender institutions, one for women, one for men. There was a mid-sized private research university and a large regional public university for the student sample, we selected the students from those who had completed the quantitative surveys and who agreed to participate in hour-long interviews for four years.

Bless their hearts, they had no idea what they were in for. But we’ll speak a little bit more of that later. But by oversampling racially minoritized students and men, the interview sample is balanced by gender. And about 30% were from underrepresented racial groups as Heather has said, there were 315 students in the original project, and over the course of four years, 131 students participated four different times.

So that’s the strictest criteria for selecting a longitudinal sample for the kinds of questions we wanted to raise. There’s other ways to do it. We have some studies that compared the year one with the year four sample, capturing those who might have been doing study abroad in the case of several in year three.

So that’s the size of it, and like we say, 1,000– almost 1,000 one-hour interview, interviews. The, the guiding interest and ultimately the unit of analysis used for many of the questions in the interview was students’ important experiences. So they selected it. We didn’t ask every student the same set of questions.

We really let them guide the interview. We’re looking for the same things with each interview, but of course, what they identified as important experiences varied from person to person. It’s grounded predominantly in self-evolution theory. Bob Kegan and Marcia Baxter Magolda’s work on that. This theory maps how people develop the internal capacities to deal with ambiguities and complexities of life and become the authors of their life.

Whereas he put it in a little footnote in– Kegan put a little footnote in his book, “Rather than just the stage on which it is played.” So that’s a real– It’s interesting. I’ve heard people talk about authoring your life in non-psychological context. It’s as though it’s a phrase of show who you are and become your own self that’s emerging in the national language, which I find really interesting.

One of the other attributes of the theory that was attractive is that it’s holistic. Both Marcia and I had done extensive work on cognitive development. I had also done other work on identity and moral development, and the link between them was always very clear. And Kegan had done that as well with three major dimensions, the cognitive, or what he called epistemological, identity or intrapersonal, and then social or interpersonal.

And in this study, we looked at all three dimensions in the interview. So it was a wide-ranging interview and oftentimes hard to fit into just an hour for that reason. This book differs from previous reports of the study in that what we’ve tried to do is to show how the parts of the study fit together.

It was a big, complex project, and piecemeal reports, as you have to do for length considerations, just don’t s- capture its scope and various purposes. Lots of other publications have described our methodological choices, the assessment challenges, the development of a 10-position assessment model instead of prior three or four positions.

And this, this, Or– And they also looked at different slices of the empirical findings. But the book provides a fuller, more comprehensive, more integrative report that also shares a lot of new data. So part of what is important in identifying the pieces that go together were a statement about the underlying assumptions about college student development.

More particularly, what constitutes development, meaning not any change is developmental, not all growth is developmental, and there are strict criteria for that, that emphasize the seeing the world more complexly and with more adaptability. So when we say what constitutes development, we’re using the prior theorizing and research to identify that.

But once you’ve identified it, like, how does it evolve? What are the personal characteristics that interact with different contexts? Really trying to, See the unders- underlying assumptions more, more fully. The we, as we ask students about their experiences, we systematically coded where they happened- what was the nature of the experience that promoted development the prevalence of each liberal education outcome that was as part of the ones we had identified for this. And those are reported in the book. We developed new techniques to analyze the developmental data and show how they were confirmed and where they both affirmed and challenged assumptions about development and its evolution.

For the book too, we wrote up five full, what we call longitudinal narratives. That is, we tried to capture each student’s developmental journeys from year to year. They illustrate our analytic process for those who are interested in the research perspective, but they capture the fuller lives of these students and where they developed and in some cases didn’t develop very much, despite involvement in high-impact practices, I might add.

So the other thing we made a point to do in this book was to also make explicit and transparent our own involvement with the project- … and the personal insights about how the project had changed us as we have looked at. And I think we’ll get into some of those questions the rest of the day.

So we hope that the fuller view of the project, the fuller view of the data, and our insights help show readers how development undergirds higher education’s ambitious goals. And really when you think about teaching critical thinking which is always been central, but now seems all the more important today’s context.

But how edu- educators can then create context to help students learn to be the author of their own lives.

Heather Shea: Wow, fabulous overview, Pat. That’s a fa- when I think about the, my knowledge of the Wabash study and the different conference sessions I’ve been to- Yeah. … about it I’d had no idea of the breadth and depth of it.

… And so this was, this is super helpful. And I think your point about naming your own your own identity processes as a part of that, … is super interesting as well. And if we don’t have a chance to talk about that, we’ll definitely have to have a second episode, … to unpack that. Yeah.

So it sounds like there are a lot of different kind of key findings. And Rosie, I think one of the key arguments that the book makes is that student development is much more complex and less linear than many of the theories we teach in graduate preparation programs. What did you learn from student stories that challenged those traditional assumptions?

Rosemary J. Perez: So in a lot of ways I think what we now have data for is things that we as student affairs educators know through our informal theories- … and lived experiences. And that is, people are messy. Honestly, I tell my students- … at the beginning of every semester, they want theory to be clean and neat.

And I say, “This, this model is the idealized version, but people are messy.” How we encounter life, the experiences we have, how we come to college, all of that informs how we might move towards this more ideal version, and whether or not that ideal version is actually good or if that, is that actually what we want is something we should c- think about, right?

Yeah.

Heather Shea: And

Rosemary J. Perez: so I think more than anything our longitudinal look, like looking at students’ stories, illustrates these things that we almost inherently know if we think about what college might have been like for us or for others. There’s lots of fits and starts, stops and starts. Things might be moving sometimes big growth or big areas of development.

Sometimes other areas are lagging. Sometimes we make regressions. We might move backwards, which I think, As educators, we don’t always want to admit people might go backwards. Where we’ve created conditions in which we might be over-challenging them, providing inadequate support, or downright being harmful if we create hostile environments where we might negatively affect students.

So in a lot of ways, I think the book illustrates things we in- informally know. I think Pat mentioned this, and I think it’s a big, important thing to highlight. People can change a lot in college, and it’s not always developmental.

They can learn a lot in college. We might see movement towards liberal art outcomes.

We might see movement towards many other desirable things that we want for people. It doesn’t necess- It might not be a developmental change. And I think that is something, again, as educators, that can be hard to accept that people are changing, but they might not, let’s say, be thinking more complexly about the world or evaluating information or thinking about themselves or have an increased capacity to work in relationship with other people.

And so I think thinking through what is development and how does it operate in context for people over time is particularly helpful. If anything, I feel like it also, when educators I’ve talked to have read the book, in many ways it does alleviate the sense that we as educators are doing everything wrong, if that makes sense.

I- in that if people aren’t making gigantic leaps by the end of college in terms of development, did we fail them? Now, I think that is a large philosophical question we raise in the book. Is there an ideal amount of development? And truthfully, I don’t think there is. I think any movement is good movement if people are developmentally ready and have support, right?

A little bit of challenge, a little bit of support. But I do think it maybe might help us, Think more about what we expect of students to accomplish, and then did we actually create the conditions to meet those things? I think sometimes very unrealistically we folks have this idea that students are going to achieve the end, the pinnacle of a model, even though many of the…

A lot of the research would suggest that’s going… These are often adult development or lifespan development theories. And if we’re looking at traditional college students, is it realistic for us to say somebody should be fully self-authored at the age of, let’s say 21, 22, when a lot of the research is saying some folks come in this way, others are moving in this direction into their 40s, right?

So what is realistic for, for us to really think about? So again I think it might help us right-size our expectations and really give some credence to things we know as educators, but maybe might doubt because we don’t have data. Now we have some data to say, “Hey, some of these things that you experience are quite realistic.”

But how might we adjust our practices to maybe better support students knowing that this is, this pattern is not necessarily an anomaly. It might be indicative of things many students are experiencing in terms of fit starts, the ups and downs of development

Heather Shea: As a parent, so I have a daughter who’s a junior actually at the University of Michigan.

And I have a, a son who’s just about to start college actually here at Michigan State- … in the fall. And I am also thinking about this through the lens of of being a parent or a family supporter of a student and hoping, during this four-year period that they’re gonna get all the skills they need.

And I think that realistic expectation or unrealistic expectation is definitely something. So maybe there’s a side project here where you could write something for parents and family members- … and supporters of students. Here’s what you, here’s what you think is gonna happen. Here’s maybe what is actually gonna happen.

No, it’s really interesting. Jim, as, as Pat was saying and Rosie was talking about, self-authorship is another key concept throughout the book. Not surprising since Marsha Baxter Magolda was one of- … one of the designers of the study. But maybe talk a little bit about how through your process in writing this book, your understanding of self-authorship has evolved through the research, and what should practitioners know about helping students develop it?

And I think this is, this kind of like application as a practitioner is really key here.

Jim Barber: Yeah. Thanks, Heather. My understanding of self-authorship has grown tremendously as as I’ve grown as a person over the course of this study. I think the first thing that comes to mind is- Just my own understanding, and I think all of us as a team have gained a much more nuanced understanding of what the journey towards self-authorship is.

I would imagine that many of your readers or your listeners as student affairs educators have learned about the self-authorship model in their their graduate programs. And I think that many people know the broad strokes about self-authorship, that it’s the idea that we as people become more complex over time, moving from a place of external foundations or external authorities into a crossroads period, moving out of that crossroads period to internal foundations where we are truly becoming that author of our life.

And I think it for many people, it’s tempting to take those four phases towards self-authorship and map them onto a traditional four-year college education and think, “Okay, you come in as a first-year student. You’re gonna be in that external area. We’re moving towards self-authorship by the time you graduate, and so each year should be about one phase.”

What we realized as we conducted these interviews and started coding and analyzing is that coding the interviews just using those broad strokes was not very interesting. We did the first year of interviews and coding and said, “Wow, most of these i- interviews are in the external area. What do we do with that?”

And so that’s when we went back as a research team guided by Pat and Marsha to really make those more fine-grained positions to move to a 10-position look at self-authorship. And so For me that’s something that, that I still use to this day in terms of looking at the more fine grain nature of development on an individual level.

A couple of the takeaways from this study as a whole that I think are important to, to talk about in this conversation, one which I think i- is the big takeaway, is that 81% of the students became more complex during the study. So fantastic. I think we sometimes- That’s good

Heather Shea: news.

Jim Barber: Yeah. We sometimes don’t talk about that much as we’re talking about the intricacies of development, but great news.

Over 80% of the students in the study became more complex over time. Very few of those students achieved internal foundations or reached self-authorship. But again, as Rosie mentioned, that may be something that we shouldn’t expect of a traditional age college student. Another takeaway from these data that really has affected the way that I interact with students and the way that I look at student learning and development is that we had students who had periods of stasis, which was just where they were not moving forward or backward for a certain period of time, sometimes years.

And that was a bit surprising. We also had some students that showed periods of regression, where they were moving to earlier ways of knowing, less complex ways of thinking. And for me, I am really, Pleased to see those data are now a part of the literature. Because I think it, it tells us and it tells our students it’s okay to rest.

Yeah. That is a normal part of development. We’ve shown through these interviews and these analyses that’s a normal part of the journey towards self-authorship for some people, is a period of stasis. 11% of the students in this study had periods of stasis. 8% had periods of regression. And so I think that is a really important takeaway that we need to incorporate into our practice as student affairs educators, and realize it is not always a developmental grind where people are moving forward every semester, every year.

Sometimes all of us need an opportunity to rest, and that’s okay, and that’s normal.

Heather Shea: Yeah, normalizing that I think is really key. And again, as a parent, that’s another piece. And I am also thinking about identity interactions like first generation college students and trans students, and who…

those whose identities may evolve significantly just because of the context of being in college. There’s some interesting- … interesting pieces there.

Patricia M. King: I could jump in here. Yep. As, yeah, Jim was emphasizing the importance of periods of rest, that one of the thing that becomes possible with rest is a very different function, and that is consolidation of this new world view.

As you develop from one position to another, your underlying assumptions about what can I know, and who am I, and who am I in interaction with others changes, and you don’t just jump through those. It is your core, and so therefore that time to consolidate. And s- s- sleep is really important too, so the rest and enabling consolidation and the time of that, I think is really something as Jim pointed out, to take seriously.

Rosemary J. Perez: Yeah. Heather, I might add when we were writing up these stories, one thing we talked about often is given that self-authorship is a holistic, theory of development, not all of the domains of development move at the same pace and space- … right? And so we often talked about a leading edge.

Sometimes something’s a little bit further ahead, and it’s like pull- it might be pulling other stuff along. Like, how do educators perhaps if you know a student perhaps is maybe really advanced cognitively, I find that a lot with my students, but maybe they have not made time or space to reflect on identity or think- about relationships, right? Are there ways to support them in areas that might be lagging that builds upon the strengths they already have?

I think there’s something there that to not think of things as behind, but to think about how can you complement as an educator what students are already doing and bringing so that, on the whole if we think about self-authorship we might move towards more complex ways of k- knowing and being.

But so we’ve got to attend to all three parts, and I think that’s tricky given that sometimes the ways our work is constructed, if we think about maybe our functional area work, sometimes it really does maybe more narrowly focus or highlight one domain. And so to really think through are there ways where m- we might think about students more holistically in how we work, because I find that is just it gets more challenging as our work keeps growing in complexity but also in scale in terms of the number of people we’re asked to serve. So sometimes it is easier to just focus on one part of a student. And, it begs this question of does that always helps, serve students well ultimately- if one of the goals we have for them is in concept moving towards self-authorship over the course of time?

Heather Shea: Yeah.

Patricia M. King: I just realized something putting different pieces of this discussion together that that I’d like to throw out. That- Yeah … as we became very clear two things, as Jim was saying, that a huge proportion of the first year students, I think it was 92%, used external structures, and a third of those used the most basic, EA it’s called.

But yet so many developed out of a strictly external into the crossroads. And what’s key about the crossroads is that they signal the emergence of that internal voice, and maybe that is the developmental goal that is more appropriate than self-authorship. That you are experience, have experiences that result in the, this emergence of the internal voice, and that as- as, as expectations are set or as you move to identify, maybe you see a leading edge here and a lagging edge there, that it could be a question to say, “What can I do to enable the emergence of the internal voice for this student in this dimension?”

I realize that’s highly individualized, but I think there’s something to be said for what to do to encourage the accessing an internal voice rather than this be solely internal, the self-authorship end of that continuum.

Heather Shea: That’s a great point. That’s a great point. I’m gonna move us to the model.

So you introduce a model called the interactionist model of college student learning and development and we have a visual, so let me share the visual. All right, is everybody seeing my screen? Okay. Pat, can you talk a little bit about what this model helps us see about students-

Patricia M. King: Yes …

Heather Shea: that maybe other developmental frameworks might miss?

Patricia M. King: Yeah. It admittedly is not self-explanatory.

Heather Shea: That’s

Patricia M. King: okay. But it’s grounded in this notion that learning and development lie at the intersection of student characteristics and features of their environments. So whereas other frameworks tend to focus primarily on development, this includes ones with my name on it, this model explicitly focuses on this interaction, acknowledging that learner characteristics are situated and expressed differently depending on the context, and that learners interpret context differently depending upon their personal characteristics.

So we have this dynamic relationship going on between the personal characteristics and the conceptual features, which is why this model is complex. I also, having had many iterations of this model, have a great admiration for appreciation for those who can create great figures, ’cause they really are hard.

But I think they’re important to try to visualize. So here at the center is the developing person.

And y- there’s a little pullout graphic that on the left side that shows the child at the top with a very open set of grid marks down the left side. And then as you go through the developmental processes, at the bottom we have, of course our graduate, just to signify development-

or in the college context. You can see that the grid marks are much narrower. So in other words at the external, hol- holding external assumptions the filter’s very permeable, and that in turn drives their meaning making. By context, it’s a smaller, less permeable filter that allows individuals to filter out external influences such as others’ expectations, to be selective in what they choose to respond to, to manage competing pressures, and how to retain a sense of self and ownership over their beliefs and values, which is consistent with self-authorship.

So th- that’s at the center. And surrounding this developing person- are the contextual influences, these three nested concentric ovals. And those show three levels of influence, the interpersonal, Which would be like interacting with friends, roommates, family members. The next circle out is institutional, like in a class, a member of a research or sports team.

And then third, that there are societal contextual influences. A local controversy, maybe another school shooting the COVID pandemic. So many things going on that don’t, you didn’t observe or experience directly yourself perhaps, but that it’s part of this larger social system. So that’s each of those are designed to convey reciprocal relationships.

Oh, I’m sorry, these arrows that you see between them are designed to show reciprocal relationships between the person and the environment at the interpersonal, institutional, and societal levels. Now, there’s probably many more than three, so those are just examples of the s- levels of influence. But that’s what we’re trying to capture here.

And then there’s three additional elements to the model, also linked by double arrows. Another reciprocal relationship, and that is that the personal characteristics are taken into account. And those are I guess the, 2:00 I see on the model. So it’s not only characteristics such as race and gender, but how your personal history affects, say, whether you’re attracted to or repelled by various curricular, co-curricular offerings.

Are, do you think it sounds fun or absolutely awful to be in student government? What about the choir? What about social justice committees? So that is often related to your history, and may or may not be race and gender specifically, but is part of your background. A second one of those, and again, this unit of analysis we keep coming back to the experiences that students have.

It could be like a intentional first year expe- experiences, a core curriculum. Maybe you participated in bystander intervention training or healthy relationships programs. But experiences can also excuse me, experiences that affect your meaning making can also be an illness, your own or that of someone close to you.

Maybe the death of a friend or a family member. Events such as ICE raids, George Floyd killing, mass casualties from hurricanes or earthquakes, political uprisings. Those are all the kinds of things that are reflected in this model as a sign of saying, “This is the kind of a way to capture the-” What might happen to students that affect their meaning making, development, and then success in, in school.

Then the third one that’s re- re- reflected here is the effects of experiences. And we went into this really keen to find and discuss at some length developmental effects, meaning those transformative learning that promoted the development, what experiences that required or demanded of the student, those that, especially those that really push the student to want to explore and do the work that comes with development.

We did find developmental effects, but most of the effects were not of that. There were many that were simply … I shouldn’t say simply, that were content effects. This is what I learned. I learned a new skill. I realized what I’m good at, what I’m, what my weaknesses are. But they didn’t tran- go into a transformative experience.

It was like a first level awareness. And some were reactions, and they’re often emotional reactions was the effect. So it really got us thinking more about, are there levels of effects that ultimately might lead to a developmental effect, or are some just what you take in, and then it may or may not take seed and grow from there?

So there’s a lot of moving parts to the model, but hopefully it reflects that basic tenet of interactivism that the characteristics of learners And contexts have reciprocal influences, and they need to be acknowledged and utilized, especially in educational settings. It is just not a simple process that we’re trying to capture here.

Heather Shea: No, not at all. But I think you did a, a beautiful job visually as well as describing it. And if you’re listening to this episode today, know that you can go back and see the model on the YouTube. And we will also post a attachment to the, the episode page so that you can take a look at this from the book.

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I’m such a visual person that I love having the visual in front of me as, as we’re talking through it. That is super helpful. And I can see how complex it was to try to describe-

…

Heather Shea: The many things that might be happening during-

Patricia M. King: Yeah

Heather Shea: a college student’s experience.

Patricia M. King: And one thing I just want to add here is that it became more complex over time because of what we saw reflected in the data.

Heather Shea: Yeah.

Patricia M. King: And so it really, it wasn’t solely a conceptual exercise of how do we, what do we think the pieces are and how do they fit together? But that we really had to struggle with, “Oh, that is an important piece that’s missing.

Keeps coming up in the interviews, and this time experience that kind of effect,” et cetera. That was the fun part of it, although it seemed like it was never going to be done.

Jim Barber: Very Well and we could see from our vantage point how these different elements interacted differently for different students.

Yeah. So for example, because we were interviewing the same students every year, which was a, a fantastic experience as an interviewer, we could see, we perhaps were interviewing- multiple students who were in the same class-

Experiencing the same curriculum, doing the same assignments, but had very different developmental outcomes as a result of that.

Likewise, sadly there were some instances where there was a student death on campus. Where students who were very close friends with the student who passed had a very different experience that year than someone on the same campus who perhaps didn’t know the student. And so we could see through our involvement, both as interviewers and summarizers and analyzers of the, the data, how these experiences affected students differently.

Heather Shea: That’s fascinating. So I’m imagining the ability for us to make real, this model, but this larger this larger concept that the book is exploring r- might be really relevant to our listeners. So Rosie, some of our folks that are listening are faculty, right? Grad students in pro- professional prep programs.

But as a practitioner, what are some of the practical ways that educators can create conditions that support student growth particularly during these times, right? There’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of challenge.

Rosemary J. Perez: Yeah. Two things immediately came to mind. I think one is to resist the urge to fix it-

Heather Shea: Yeah

Rosemary J. Perez: right away. And it- Certainly make referrals as appropriate, like if people have basic needs issues or mental health concerns. Those referrals are appropriate. But I do think sometimes in the field there is a tendency, as good helpful people, to want to fix things rather than help students sit sometimes in things that don’t require us to fix it.

Where the struggle is actually part of development, and us fixing it, and we might actually be getting in the way- Yeah … because we’re not letting students sit with discomfort. And I think, particularly as we’re in an era where student satisfaction is key, like we’re worried about pleasing people-

I sometimes wonder if that’s act- we’re- are we actually getting in our own way as it relates to development? So getting in the … Don’t get … Allow people to sit in it sometimes. It’s not fun. But to that end, we gotta sit with them in it. What we found quite a bit is that these interviews, and I would say this is about all the longitudinal work that I’ve done.

I’ve done, like three big studies where I’m talking to people for a long time. It is rare that humans get an opportunity to talk about the things that matter to them uninterrupted and- to not get at a particular thing. And by that, Pat mentioned we center their inter- we centered participants’ interests and experiences.

We tried to listen to them. We weren’t trying to fix something, just the gift of presence. And I’ve continuously had students say that they just don’t get to do this But it’s very helpful, and they learn a lot, and sometimes it helps them realize things that they didn’t know. So often, honestly, like reflection is a extremely effective and low-cost developmental intervention, but we don’t use it.

Patricia M. King: Yeah.

Rosemary J. Perez: We just don’t use it. Yeah. And I keep thinking about this. In the Wabash study, there was a student who shared a very similar cultural background to me. I’m Filipino American. And the student kept saying– And I just could see myself. The student kept saying “I am a science major. I am gonna keep taking these science classes, and I’m going to go to graduate school in science or medical school.”

And they kept saying like the, they kept saying “But I’m not doing well in these classes, and I actually don’t like these classes.” So at one point, I just and I, you’re trying to listen and really honor and understand and finally just said, “Okay, can you take me through this?

Because you’re telling me you’re taking these classes. You’re not doing that great in them, and you don’t like them. Why do you want to go to graduate school in them?” And they just stopped in the interview and “Oh, that’s– I don’t know. That’s a really, that’s a really good question.” And I said, “Okay.

I, I was just wondering ’cause I was just trying to understand you. I was trying to understand.” I didn’t say “You should do something else.” But the next year- … our first question was like what’s new or different, and the first thing they said was, “I changed my major” basically to this other thing they were really interested in and were doing well in, right?

And that was not my intent to nudge the student to change the major. It honestly was just to say I don’t under- I just don’t understand why you’re making yourself miserable.” Yeah. But it was sitting with them in struggle.

Jim Barber: Yeah.

Rosemary J. Perez: And I really would encourage us to think through are there opportunities for us to sit with students in struggle and really just use the skills that we have to ask good questions and listen and provide opportunities to return to that interaction in a relationship.

I know, again, like I’ve talked about trying to serve students at scale. This becomes increasingly challenging with advising loads or, enrollment, issues where maybe your classroom is too big. And yet what I have learned across three longitudinal studies is that people just really want to be heard and have space held for them, and we just don’t do it enough.

Heather Shea: Yeah.

Rosemary J. Perez: It’s like a it’s actually tragically rare, is what I have come away with. And particularly in times of uncertainty and challenge, to me, like in addition to making appropriate referrals, how might we sit with students in struggle is probably the biggest thing we can do with them and be in relationship and willing to return to that follow-up check-in again.

Heather Shea: Seems like an important note for educators, and I’ll keep going back to parents as well, right? It’s easy to want to step in and fix the issue- … particularly as somebody who has, works in higher ed. But the value of them figuring it out or even just sitting with the question is really important.

So Jim, can you talk a little bit about how the book concludes? So it talks a little bit about these five habits of mind, maybe sitting and struggle with students might be one of those. Can you share a little bit about those and which of those habits feel most important for higher education professionals right now, and why?

Jim Barber: Yeah, absolutely. So we really thought long and hard about how we wanted to conclude this book. Because it has been such a journey, such a labor of love for us over the years, we wanted to find a way to bring people in to what we’ve learned from these data. And so we decided as part of the concluding chapter to have these habits of mind, which are really an invitation for other educators, student affairs educators faculty in the classroom, coaches.

I really look at, at, at our audience broadly as anyone working with and supporting college students.

How can we invite other college educators to come in, into this learning or unlearning with us? And so we came to five habits of mind that I’ll review briefly for the conversation now.

And it starts with habit of mind one, which is listen to and learn about the complex and interrelated elements of learning outcomes, development, and experiences. So looking at that visual that we just talked through, and then bringing in what Rosie just talked about making the time to listen to students and learn about their own experiences, knowing that each individual is gonna experience those environments differently habit of mind two is to unlearn linear models of development in favor of a more fluid conceptualization of development.

So as I mentioned earlier in the conversation sometimes i- in, grad programs, we learn the broad strokes, and we learn about okay, this is a developmental journey from less complex to more complex or from external to internal. But we know from these data in the Wabash study and from many other studies over the last twenty years that development is not linear, that it is messy, as Rosie said.

Habit of mind three is to create opportunities for students to reflect on their experiences and what they’re learning or unlearning. Rosie, just hit the nail on the head a moment ago with, this is low-hanging fruit to help students reflect. And I have to say, even years later, I have a vivid memory from one of the Wabash interviews where o- one of our kind of probing questions was tell us what you’re learning.

Tell us what you’ve learned.” And one of the students thought about it and said, “No one’s ever asked me that before.”

And it was just like, oh my goodness, as an educator, that just went straight to my heart as oh, no one’s asked you what you’ve- what you’re learning. A- and I think that’s, at the heart of this habit of mind is just create the opportunities to reflect, and it can be as simple as just asking a student, “What are you learning?”

Habit of mind four is to be aware of the impact of dissonance on students’ lives and learning. And remember that everybody has their own challenges. And going back to the idea that, you don’t know what somebody else is going through when you encounter them during the day. We as educators don’t know everything that our students are going through.

And so to be aware that people have their own individual challenges and that dissonance is at work, and that’s, that may be affecting or promoting their development in some way. And then the fifth habit of mind is to acknowledge and seek to address the additional developmental demands that minoritized students encounter.

We’ve talked over the course of this conversation about the importance of having a diverse sample of students to talk with i- in the study. And what we’ve learned in analyzing the data and conducting these interviews is that students’ identities really matter. It is central to who they are and central to how they experience their college learning development and environments.

And so that’s something that shouldn’t be minimized. It’s something that we need to address, acknowledge and see as a key component of their dev- their developmental experience. So those are the five habitis- habits of mind that we end the book with. I feel like you’ve set me up to, to choose a favorite- – out of five.

Heather Shea: All of them? Yeah.

Jim Barber: All, all of them are important. I think if I had to choose one, I would I would look at that area of reflection- … because I think that can impact the other four. That simply creating opportunities for students to reflect can be life-changing for somebody and really affect their developmental trajectory.

Heather Shea: Yeah. And I’ve learned this is related to my own dissertation research around reflection happening in community, right? In community with other students who may have had similar experiences, and then that adds kind of a layer of richness-

…

Heather Shea: As well. That’s fantastic. I have one final question, and then we’ll get to our typical closing question.

And I’d love to hear from all of you on this. So if you could change one thing about how our colleges and universities are thinking about student development based on what you’ve learned from this re- research, what would it be? And Pat, I’ll s- I’ll start with you.

Patricia M. King: This was the hardest question.

I’m sure you all looked at the questions.

The one thing part. But and I didn’t realize this would become a theme here. Jim’s comment about, “No one’s ever asked me this before.” So many students thanked us for the opportunity to meet each year through that process. Some people said, “I’ve been looking forward to and preparing for this interview all years, all year long” and how sharing their experiences is a powerful intervention.

Somewhere along the line, some version of finding ways to provide these rich experiences, but to learn and practice reflection. Study abroad, I think, has some programs are really good with that. Others, it’s just fill out the questionnaire and don’t think as you answer reflective questions.

But I, I just even asking stu- if you’re worried about getting started, something you had a strong positive or negative reaction to, how relationships with friends or family have changed, et cetera, your new hopes. But key to this, and picks up with your reflection and community idea, Heather, is having a trusted partner-

In that process who’s asked perceptive and non-judgmental questions to be there to listen and maybe just offer observations, like in Rosie’s example would be a great a- a asset to the process. And as I think about that though, I think it’s, part is to recognize that development undergirds learning.

It doesn’t always happen. It doesn’t happen fast. It usually doesn’t happen automatically by itself. Rather, it’s when students can recognize an unproductive pattern- … in their own behavior, and they’re motivated to learn to do things differently, and that reflection can stimulate that process.

It needn’t take a crisis to take time to sit back and think about what’s going on, but it often does take a crisis, and that’s too bad ’cause it can be happen- it can, some crises can be avoided by thinking about it first.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Beautifully said. Thank you. Rosie, how about you? What would you change about how we think about student development on college and university campuses?

Rosemary J. Perez: I want us to think of it as co- still think of it as core to the work versus an add-on. Sure. And I think we’re in an era in where the movement towards outcomes, meaning typically employability-

Development isn’t sacrifice. We don’t have to sacrifice an interest in development in service of employability.

And I feel like the overemphasis sometimes on career development there are things that are developmental that would make people more employable.

Being able to think critically, being able to work with others, being self-aware and being able to take feedback. Yeah. But we don’t think of those things as necessarily developmental or developmentally de- cultivated- per se. And so I wish we could think about some of these outcomes we want in terms of employment that might be, things we’re trying to track or economic outcomes. But there are things that are, that could be cultivated developmentally that would work in service of those things. They’re just not fluffy extras.

And I think I just have really brustled at the idea that the work that many educators do is now considered to be, like- … extra or fluffy as opposed to core to the academic mission and the social mission of higher education. I will get off my soapbox, but that’s just- … like the things I just think about this all the time.

Heather Shea: Yeah. I hear you. Absolutely. Jim, how about you?

Jim Barber: I think what I would add to the conversation is a continued push to look at development as more fluid and less linear.

I think for me there still in the field is an assumption and a practice to try to move people along, to try to, be sure that people are advancing.

Even the language that we use is very linear. And one of the things that stands out to me that I’m really proud of as an outcome of this research is documenting that there are periods of stasis, that rest is normal, that it’s necessary. And so I think there’s been some progress in that area over the last five or 10 years in terms of how we look at development and how we look at rest and wellbeing.

I, I hope that we continue to move in that direction of looking at development as a more fluid process rather than one that’s a a linear journey.

Heather Shea: Great. This is our last question. We always like to end with this podcast is called Student Affairs Now. What are you thinking about, pondering and considering now?

And you might also share how people can get in touch with you, email, LinkedIn, et cetera. Jim, I’m gonna start with you.

Jim Barber: Oh, you tricked me.

Heather Shea: I did. I went forward and backwards.

Jim Barber: Okay. Something that I’m thinking about now i- a- as a part of this conversation and just broadly in my work-

…

Jim Barber: Is how can we promote reflection for students?

Given the, the technology that we have now, given the places and spaces that students are gathering both virtually and in person, what are the ways that we as educators can help to promote that sense of reflection? Because it is so important to learning and development. And I would I would love for people to reach out to me.

You can find me on LinkedIn. And my email address is also easy to remember. It’s jpbarber@wm.edu. So I would love to continue the conversation.

Heather Shea: Great. Thanks so much, Jim. Rosie, how about you?

Rosemary J. Perez: I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, and I’m, like, trying not to take up AI too much. I’ve used it occasionally, but not a lot, to be honest.

But I truly am wondering, like, how is AI affecting development? There’s a little early work on cognitive development.

There’s opport- there’s some fears about how some people are using it to cultivate relationships-

…

Rosemary J. Perez: Instead of talking to humans, right? It can possibly provide useful opportunities to get information about identity.

It can both be a helpful tool and a harmful one. And I’m wondering if we look over time, like, how will this inform students’ development? Are we gonna rely less on kind of this interpersonal interaction, being in real life? We’ve already talked about that with social media, but AI gives us a different sense of, of being a thing to interact with- Yeah

To be in relationship with. So I’m just thinking about that before the robots come for us, which also terrifies me. Which I… Every time people say that, I’m like, “No.” I’m like, “Oh, but maybe.” I hope not. But if people would like to stay in touch my email is on the Marsal Family School of Education website, and I am also on LinkedIn.

Heather Shea: Great. Thanks so much, Rosie. Pat, final thoughts and-

Patricia M. King: Watts, you filled my head with it just today. And I think I’m so very aware of the challenges of taking insights from individual developmental journeys to scale, and how it’s a contradiction of something. As you talk about the importance of individualized learning and how many variations we saw on the different pathways to the journey and all the boulders and hills people ran into as they traversed their college experience.

The taking it to scale really I find overwhelming, and trying to think which… Are there certain characteristics that are important? They are, but which ones would you scale up? And I just don’t know. I default to smaller communities where there’s opportunity for exchange and dialogue and trusted partners and and whatnot And when you add social media and AI to that, it’s a very different definition of what’s a social environment even.

How to be respectful and polite on social media seems like a question that doesn’t get asked very much so I wrestle with those kinds of things, and I don’t have a certain thing saying, “Oh clearly we need to answer for that.” And my email is also very easy. It’s my name, Pat King, all one word, @umich.edu.

Heather Shea: Great. Before we wrap up, I just wanna take a moment, send my gratitude to the three of you. Thank you so much for saying yes when I reached out about doing an episode on this book. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, your experiences, and this incredible work with all of us. Thanks also to our sponsor of today’s episode, Evolve.

Given the current context of higher education, we need to invest in leaders with the capacity and capabilities to transform their institutions and the future of higher education. The Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership offers four leadership coaching journeys tailored to four different leadership levels.

Each is a three-month journey that includes individual and group coaching, plus a curated curriculum of short and asynchronous video modules. They also offer Evolve for leadership teams. If you’re ready to involve your… evolve your leadership voice, visit evolve-institute.com to learn more. Huge thank you as always to Nat Ambrosey, our incredible producer.

Your behind-the-scenes brilliance makes every episode possible. We are so grateful for you. And we would love it if you are interested in supporting these conversations. Your listening, sharing, and recommending makes all of this possible. So if you found this helpful, please do for- forward it along to your colleagues and friends.

And you can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to our podcast, liking on YouTube or subscribing to YouTube, and our weekly newsletter announcing each episode and more. And if you’re so inclined, you can leave us a five-star review. I didn’t write that part. That was… That’s Keith’s blurb. Thank you, Keith.

Finally, I’m Heather Shea. Thanks for watching and listening. Take care of yourselves, take care of one another, and let’s make it a great week.

King, P. M., Perez, R. J., & Barber, J. P. (2024). Exploring Complexities in College Student Development: Critical Lessons from Researching Students’ Journeys. Routledge.

King, P. M., Perez, R. J., & Barber, J. P. (2023). Variability Patterns in the Self-Authorship Trajectories: Complicating Understanding of Development, Review of Higher Education, 47 (1), 1-30. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/907269

King, P. M., Perez, R. J., & Barber, J. P. (2022). A four-year study of self-authorship development: Evidence from the Wabash National Study. Journal of College Student Development, 63(6), 626-642. DOI: 10.1353/csd.2022.0052