Helping College Students Find Purpose E-Book

Robert J. Nash

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 520

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Helping College Students Find Purpose Today's college students are demanding that their educational experiences address the core questions of meaning and purpose. . . What does it mean to be successful? How will I know what type of career is best for me? Why do I hurt so much when a relationship ends? Why do innocent people have to suffer? Faculty and administrators are in the unique position to make special contributions to their students' search for meaning, and when they work together, everyone on a college campus benefits. Helping College Students Find Purpose provides a theory-to-practice model of meaning-making that enables the entire campus community to participate in the process. Based on a practical how-to approach, the authors outline a series of concrete steps for applying the theory and practice of meaning-making to teaching, leading, administering, and advising. Filled with real-life vignettes, this guidebook includes the background knowledge and proven tools that will help faculty and administrators act as effective mentors to students. While there is no single solution that can meet everyone's needs, the authors provide a series of classroom and cross-campus strategies that are specifically designed to help students successfully navigate their diverse meaning-making activities and effectively enhance their quest for meaning.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

Dedication

Preface

Questions of Meaning

The Quarterlife Generation and the Malady of Meaninglessness

The Meaning of Meaning

Scope and Structure

Caveats

About the Authors

Part I - Making Meaning in the Quarterlife

Chapter 1 - Is the Quarterlife Generation Ready for Meaning-Making?

Quarterlife Challenges

Cycles of Quarterlife Meaning-Making

Introducing Maigret Lisee Fay: The Life and Times of a Cycle-Five Quarterlifer

What Cycle-Five Quarterlifers Can Teach Other Quarterlifers

Two Potential Meaning-Making Moments

How One Quarterlifer Created Meaning in a Seminar

From Quarterlife Questions to Meaning for a Lifetime

Chapter 2 - Exploring the Meaning of Meaning Existentialism and Postmodernism

Existential Perspectives on Meaning

Returning to Amy

The Postmodern Worldview: We Made It All Up

The Postmodern Worldview

Summary of Pivotal Postmodern Themes

Conclusion

Chapter 3 - Finding Meaning in Religion and Spirituality Why Can’t My Faith Be Cool?

Why Is Faith So Threatening to Academia?

Religious and Spiritual Illiteracy on Our Campuses

The Universal Quest for Religio-Spiritual Meaning

The Types of Students Who Come into Our Campus Venues

A Quarterlife Portrait of a Spiritual Pragmatist

The Art of Mixed-Belief Capaciousness in Making Meaning

How to Avoid Giving Offense

A Final Thought: Religio-Spirituality in the Wake of 9/11

Part II - Putting Meaning-Making to Work: Tools of the Trade

Chapter 4 - A Pedagogy of Constructivism Deep-Meaning Learning

Rachel’s Deep-Meaning Learning

A Constructivist Approach to Educating for Meaning

Creating Constructivist Settings for Deep-Meaning Learning

Responsible Construction

Chapter 5 - Make Room for Meaning Practical Advice

Tell Stories

Ask Philosophical Questions

Create Purposeful Silence

Tackle Tough Topics

Connect Content and Context

Expanding the Educator’s Toolbox

Chapter 6 - The Ethics of Meaning-Making

A Code of Ethics for Meaning-Makers

Resisting Temptations to Take Over

Final Ethical Tips

Chapter 7 - Meaning Maxims for Both Inside and Outside the Classroom

Part III - Our Own Attempts to Make Meaning

Chapter 8 - Two Personal Reflections for Our Readers

Swimming Lessons

The Joy in My Teaching Is the Meaning in My Teaching

Resources for Meaning-Making Educators

References

Index

Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nash, Robert J.

p. cm. - (Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series) Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-55718-1

1. Education, Higher-United States. 2. Education, Humanistic-United States.

3. Existentialism. I. Murray, Michele C. II. Title.

LA227.4.N36 2010

378.19’8-dc22 2009038858

HB Printing

The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series

Foreword

It has been said that the future will belong to those who can tell the best story of the twenty-first century. We human beings all dwell within stories absorbed from our culture, mediated by family, friends, and associates, and ratified by conventional media, religious faith communities, scientific inquiry, political discourse, commercial advertising, and other institutions that shape our common life. These stories are inevitably recast as we continually twist and stretch them in our efforts to make sense of self, world, cosmos—demanding ways to maintain a firm grip on reality. The stories we live and tell provide coherence and meaning and orient our sense of purpose. The master stories—our personal and cultural myths—determine what we value and whom we love.

When the narrative becomes too thin or sketchy to stand up to the task of everyday meaning-making and begins to unravel, we drift into meaninglessness and grow vulnerable to isolation and desolation—or mere unthinking busyness. On the other hand, the story may be fiercely defended, yet if it is simply too tightly woven to embrace the fullness of a larger truth, it may constrain the potential of our lives and even become dangerous to others and ourselves.

Thus in every generation, a part of growing up is the development of the capacity to reflect on the meaning-making tales given to us and to critically examine the assumptions, biases, strengths, and viability of those stories. We discover that the journey into adulthood requires us to become conscious of the individual and collective meanings we make and to learn to compose over time a worthy story to live by. This is the deep purpose of the journey from ignorance to knowledge, and every society has a stake in whether and how our young discover and work this task.

This meaning-making is distinctively challenged in today’s world. We live in a time “between stories.” The great cultural myths—religious, political, economic—that have guided our societies are now under severe review as our generations are asked to live at one of those great hinge times in history. We are contending with unprecedented conditions (e.g., breaking open the human genome, climate change, a global economy), and we now stand on new moral and ethical frontiers.

Nash and Murray invite all who work in higher education to recognize that in every era the college years are a critical time in the life span for examining, testing, and re-creating the stories we live by. University students are ripe for discerning a narrative that is worthy of the potential of a young adult life and for doing so in ways that enable them to see themselves as an integral part of a larger communal reality—a shared dialogue at the heart of the human enterprise, a disciplined dialogue that must necessarily embrace both the wonderful and the terrible—a hard-headed, open-hearted, and difficult practice that has consequences for both self and world.

Providing persuasive evidence that too many of our students are bored, angry, driven, and mere consumers of courses and credentials without access to a worthy “Why?”, Nash and Murray offer compelling descriptions of students’ hunger for meaning and clear, practical approaches from their own teaching experience about how to respond as “meaning constructivist” educators. They make vivid the significance of the “quarter-life crises” in the lifelong journey of meaning-making, and illumine the power of the interdependent roles of faculty, administrators, and students affairs professionals who serve by intention or default as “meaning mentors.”

At the same time, Nash and Murray know that most faculty and others who provide leadership within the academy typically do not perceive that questions of meaning lie within the domain of their personal and professional expertise. Indeed, much of today’s professional training does not prepare people for “deep-meaning education,” though the wider public could rightly presume that questions of meaning, purpose, and significance are central to the intellectual life, integral to the work of every discipline, and threaded throughout the shared life of the campus—on behalf of the wider culture. The particular approaches offered here will not be the mode for all, but the underlying principles that they make explicit will inform the imagination of every educator who embraces the dual vocation of higher education: to create and impart knowledge and to serve as a primary, privileged setting for the formation of adulthood, citizenship, and leadership.

The aspiration of this book is that we will find here a pathway into deeper reflection on the purposes of higher education and our roles within it. We are invited to rediscover our capacity to work with students in ways that do not impose a particular narrative upon them, but do create the space in which we may appropriately evoke, respond, inform, clarify, enrich, and even inspire the meaning-making process of our students—encouraging their capacity for curiosity, skepticism, and meaningful commitments.

As we move into the formidable challenges of the twenty-first century, it becomes increasingly evident that we have been far too naïve about the power and adequacy of the master narratives being offered to the next generations. This book invites us to reclaim the core of the intellectual life, inviting our students into a disciplined, far-reaching dialogue that begins with “Why. . .?” “How do we know. . .?” and “For what. . .?” Here faculty, administrators, and student affairs professionals are reminded that meaning-making is a domain that cannot be deferred to presumed cultural norms already in place. This call for a more adequate understanding of what we mean by higher education asks all of us to relinquish our tendency to defer the bigger questions to “experts”—be they philosophers or counselors. We are invited to a “crossover pedagogy” in which across the life of the campus, we may more effectively grapple with the reality of our students as whole persons and reclaim our neces sary role in the human adventure of meaning-making—on behalf of the renewal of the vocation of higher education, its vital role in today’s global commons, and in the individual lives we serve.

Sharon Daloz Parks Author, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams

To all my students over a four-decade period, whose presence in my classes and in my life has been the major inspiration for this book. To Madelyn, my partner for almost five decades, who understands the indefatigable need I have to write in order to make sense of my world, my vocation, and my own ongoing quest for meaning. To Michele C. Murray, my brilliant and talented coauthor, colleague, and dear friend, who has taught me more about meaning-making than she might have thought possible.

Finally, to the best senior editor I have ever had, David Brightman, along with his expert team at Jossey-Bass—without whom there would be no book on meaning-making.

—Robert J. Nash

To the students I have had the privilege to know and whose journeys to meaning have inspired me. To Robert J. Nash, who invited me into this project and who has brightened my world. To my parents, Dwight and Elodie, who were my first teachers and meaning mentors. To my husband, Chris Lewers, who brings new meaning to my life and who is a source of great blessings.

—Michele C. Murray

Preface

We wrote this book with two major audiences in mind. Because Robert is a faculty member and an Official University Scholar in the social sciences and the humanities at his university, and Michele is a student affairs vice-president and innovator at hers, we obviously want to reach both the professoriate and higher education administrators. We believe strongly that when it comes to teaching for meaning-making, no single group in the academy owns the meaning-making or purpose-driven life. Nor does any single group on campus own the intellectual life. Education, when done well, is cross-disciplinary, collaborative, and student-centered. Faculty and administrators need one another as active, knowledgeable, passionate collaborators if we are to be successful in helping our students to discover, and to create, in Frankl’s (Frankl, 1979) words, a “meaning to live for.” (See Resource B, Crossover Pedagogy, in the Resources section for a fuller treatment of this type of collaboration.)

In this day and age, the old academic and administrative silos are imploding. All the campus constituencies, including our students, are looking for creative ways to save ourselves, to save one another, to save the best that knowledge and wisdom have to offer, and to save our institutions and our planet. As Rorty (1999) has said, in the absence of any metaphysical or political certainty that all of us can agree on in a troubled, strife-filled, postmodern world, the most that we can hope for is to “huddle together against the darkness” in order to produce some light. In other words, we are all struggling to make meaning of our existence, and sometimes it is wiser for us to do this together, if we are to survive as a human species. Faculty and administrators have unique and special contributions to make in the search for meaning, and when they make the effort to work together, everyone on a college campus benefits. For us, there is simply no alternative.

We hope that faculty in their individual disciplines will take away from our book a set of creative philosophical or psychological rationales, and pedagogical strategies, for teaching about meaning—in the classroom, lecture hall, and seminar room. We hope that administrators will discover inspiring and helpful ways to meet students where they are, anywhere on campus and beyond, in their meaning-making ventures. Most of all, though, we want faculty and student affairs administrators to collaborate actively and directly, when appropriate, both inside and outside the classroom. We are committed to the proposition that both groups have much to teach one another, and, in so doing, they will have that much more to teach students about how to make meaning.