Advising Statement
It is not unusual, I suppose, for professors to claim that advising is an extension of their teaching. Too often, though, I feel that such claims serve merely to suggest rather vague parallels between undeniably different activities. So in developing what I consider to be a philosophy of advising, I’ve tried to keep in mind exactly what about it really is similar to what we do as educators.
My basic goal in the classroom—which I internally refer to as “meta-pedagogy”—is to make students aware of the educational process itself. They are encouraged to participate actively in the construction of syllabi, organization of class activities, and the conveyance of knowledge. They are taught to consider the implications of educational policy-making and pedagogical presentation so that they might become more critical of the practices the affect their own acquisition and uses of knowledge. My experience has taught me that students often perceive educators not as people working to help them, but as obstacles between them and their futures. I’ve come to realize that such (erroneous) perceptions are partially the result of their detachment from or non-participation in the educational system. Most go to class, take their exams, and fill out their evaluations because they are asked to do so but not necessarily because they understand the reasons for doing so. However interested they may be in knowing them, they often are conditioned not to ask about them, not to question the effectiveness of the system that shapes their lives. I have been impressed by the positive, sometimes transformative, reactions of students once they are comfortable enough to ask these “forbidden” or, at least, difficult questions.
Now advising, because it usually takes place one on one, offers perhaps the best means to get students thinking about some of these broader issues and, for this reason in particular, I have found that my approach to teaching has been largely applicable to advising. The first point I explain to every one of my new advisees is that the purpose of our semester meetings will not be simply to plan a class schedule for next term. Rather, it will be to discuss long-term life and career goals that will inform—even determine—how we should approach planning for every term. English is a wonderful major precisely because it allows one so many options after graduation—teaching, publishing, law school, business, etc.—but such flexibility can also cause students to delay thinking much about life after college. My conversations at these meetings invariably focus, therefore, on what it is that makes English so useful in such vastly different lines of work. What emerges, in the best cases, is a greater understanding on the part of the student that vocational skills are secondary in the minds of many employers to the cognitive skills—analytical reading, critical thinking, rhetorical, and compositional skills—that allow a particular individual to adapt thoroughly to any working environment. Further, because literature cultivates in its most attuned readers a potentially exceptional capacity for empathy, a true literary education serves to develop useful intellectual traits that are balanced by a concern for humanity that is insistently primary. Now obviously none of this knowledge means much if it comes simply from me; the success of the academic advising session depends on the extent to which students and faculty meet their respective responsibilities, and so I see my role largely as a provoker of certain lines of thought not typically encouraged in the classroom—but lines of thought that can enhance the classroom experience in crucial ways.
Finally, if teaching and advising are truly comparable activities, then we should be as willing to carry our advising into our teaching and vice versa. Moving advising out of the office and into the classroom transforms it from an unnecessarily private activity between mentor and protégé into a form of public service that begins to clarify what our students truly need from us, potentially rendering “student-centered learning” more than simply a buzzword. For me, as both a graduate and an undergraduate advisor, such clarity has guided the sorts of departmental and university service on which I’ve chosen to focus my time. For example, in considering the problems my graduate students will face on the brutal humanities job market (only one in three humanities Ph.D.s nation-wide will be hired on the tenure track), I’ve realized that good advice isn’t very good if the system doesn’t support adequately the student’s ability to implement it. Since these students will have to publish articles, teach their own successful classes, and serve on university committees just to be considered for assistant professorships, “fixing the system,” in their case, has meant incorporating advising that is focused on professional development matters. To this end, I have created two new courses, both now mandatory in my department, for incoming graduate students: one a research methods course, and the other a professional development workshop. To the same end, I have recently published Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Manage an Academic Career in the Humanities, a book that makes much more widely public the private advice I have come to believe is most crucial to this particular population of students. Through such activities I’ve tried to embrace the idea that advising has to be more than lip service—more than simply some “other” thing that we do; in a sense, I’ve come to believe it’s the main thing that we do.
