The Definition You’ve Been Waiting For: How Does it Impact You? - Adventures in Advising

In this episode of Adventures in Advising, Matt and Ryan chat with returning guest, Dr. Janet Schulenberg, about NACADA’s newly unveiled definition of academic advising and framework. Janet reflects on how the task force’s work moved from development to a formal resource for the profession. This conversation explores the definition’s central message, its implications for advisor identity and institutional responsibility, and how it can help clarify boundaries, advocate for support, and shape the future of advising practice.

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Well, hello, and welcome back to the Adventures in Advising podcast. Matt Markin and Ryan Scheckel here, and we're going to jump right into our interview by welcoming back our guest, Dr. Janet Schulenburg. Janet, how are you?

Janet Schulenberg  
Hi, everyone. I'm good.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, and so this is a follow-up conversation to the previous episode you were on, episode 138 where we were discussing the Nakata task forces work to develop a formal definition of academic advising at that time of that recording with that panel, the definition was still taking shape, and there were still some important questions about scope and identity boundaries, institutional responsibility, the complexity of all of it. And now that the definition and scope have been officially unveiled, we have you returning to kind of unpack what that actually means for all of us, so when we spoke, what, like nine months ago or so, again, that academic advising definition of scope, it was still a work in progress. Before we kind of jump into what it means now, what the actual definition is, what was it like for you to finally see it unveiled?

Janet Schulenberg  
Exciting and nerve-wracking, I guess, are the two most pertinent words. I don't know, and I feel hopeful about it. I think that's actually the main, the main feeling I'm having. Like, I really hope that this positions our professional association to exert more influence in higher education, and that the work of academic advising can be more broadly understood as having the important role it really should have. It's gratifying, because this is one of the things that Marie Lyndhurst and I were calling for in our 2008 advising is advising article. I still remain proud of that one, and we argued that advising is a deeply meaningful and serious endeavor, and that that changes students' lives, and that also creates new knowledge about higher education. We wanted others to recognize that, and I feel like this was a little bit of a culmination of that that argument.

Ryan Scheckel  
I think about the patience necessary at times, and also the perspective for folks who have listened to Janet on previous podcast episode and read your work, you know, you spend some time in the history of things, and it does feel a little bit like a watershed moment, hopefully, but for anyone who has not read the definition yet, I guess we should read it formally here, so everyone can hear that. But then, afterwards, if you could maybe describe its central message in plain language as well.

Janet Schulenberg  
So, the formal definition that has been recently adopted by the NACADA Board of Tractors is this: Academic Advising is a field of study and profession that focuses on the intellectual, personal, and educational development of advisees as they engage with higher education. The research-informed practice of academic advising is founded on interpersonal relationships that support, understand, and empower individual advisees to navigate their academic journeys and to make personally, socially, and culturally relevant meaning of their learning experiences. Academic advising creates unique expertise in how curricula, policies, and institutional cultures shape and are shaped by learner goals and experiences. So, the central message there really is that academic advising focuses on how students make meaning of their learning experiences, and that's practice requires distinctive, specialized expertise that has value to institutions as a whole. The other thing that this does is it clarifies that anyone who is asked to advise has that full suite of responsibilities of an academic advisor, and that institutions have a responsibility to support that academic advisor to meet those responsibilities. So, previous definitions really have tried to be intentionally inclusive, so they focus more on what advisors do, or what outcomes it has for students or institutions. Really, this asserts what advising is, that it's a professional practice, and that it's a field of study that creates new knowledge. So, that inclusion in previous definitions was also a little bit problematic. So, practicing without a common definition left open to interpretation or even personal opinion. What advising is or why it matters, and who can do it. And so, seeing the professional association agree with the need to clarify that and make this step is important, and hopefully this definition gives us a good first step towards asserting this distinctiveness.

Matt Markin  
I'm assuming you've made a lot of people very happy now that there is this formal definition, and I know from the last time you were on the podcast, we know that this was a work in progress, this was numerous conversations happening, a lot of back and forth, so I guess with that in mind, were there any critiques or pieces of feedback that maybe significantly sharpened this kind of final definition.

Janet Schulenberg  
Yeah, for sure. So, there were two major areas, or major ways that we sought feedback from people who care about the definition, one that was in progress as we recorded the prior podcast, and those were listening sessions with members. The other was conducted just prior to the annual conference, and that was a member survey. So both of them were really informative, both led to revisions, but they were really different avenues for contributing, and so I think we heard really different voices across those two methods of seeing, hearing reactions, and seeking input. So, from the listening sessions, that initial definition really focused heavily on the practice of academic advising, and our contributors to those sessions called out the under representation of the insights that about higher education that academic advising yields, so that led to strengthening the claim of distinctive knowledge. We also heard some really strong calls in those listening sessions to explicitly state that advising is human to human work, so you know we really, we tried to tweak this, so it focused on each individual student as a unique whole person. That's why the word individual is in that, the actual definition. Also, over that time, like AI advanced dramatically, so artificial intelligence was just kind of starting as we were starting this work, just starting to make it into our vernacular, and now it's like increased so dramatically over the course of the task force work that we felt it was important to point at where we got to a point where some higher ed leaders seem to think that AI will do the work of advisors, so the responsibility section that we laid out, which we should probably talk about as well, at some point in this, that those responsibilities in particular make it clear that this is human sense making and meaning making work. It's not just conveying information. The member survey called out strong support for claiming advising as a profession, that's a debatable definition, right? But people who practice academic advising feel strongly that they are professionals, so there are additional things that the professional association can do to further strengthen that, but we felt confident in moving forward with that. We did hear that there might be some concern about how some people whose primary role is not advising might be, feel might feel, and being asked to rise to practicing as a professional, and they'll need some support to do that. That's part of the institutional responsibilities that that member survey also called out some ambiguous wording, redundancy in the initial draft, but the real major contribution was adding dramatically to the key responsibilities of institutions in supporting academic advising academic advisors to meet their responsibilities.

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, the process here, like, it's there's a lot to unpack when just looking at the words and the definition and the meaning and purpose, and like what might happen, and we'll, we'll talk more about those ideas, but there's just a lot of perspectives involved in this process, and you know your role is chairing this task force. Can you tell us a little bit more about like the perspectives of task force members too, and how they influence and shaped the final submission, even if it's just from the point of view of what's it like trying to incorporate that many different perspectives to reach something that's workable.

Janet Schulenberg  
The NACADA board appointed an amazing task force, like, so they were very intentional about including people from a variety of expertise and perspectives that every single person contributed to where we landed in substantial ways, so I do want to shout out my task forces: Sharon Akun Wisniewski, Jason Barkemeyer, Gabe Bermea, Carol Cohen, Sam Gizerian, Tony Lazarowicz, Laura Mooney, Billie Streufert, and Ashley Thomas, every single person brought some unique expertise and insight that ended up shaping the final outcome, and every person knows the literature and the practice of academic. So we started off on really solid footing, but some of the things that those individuals brought were heavy emphasis on the importance of relationships for a variety of student backgrounds and aspirations, right, so the multicultural kind of backgrounds that our students come from, the intersection between education and family and career, that all of that needs to be unpacked and acknowledged. Students, students need to be acknowledged as whole people who have all of these different priorities. Another one on the on profession, we spent a lot of time talking about this, and there are authors in this on this task force who have written criticizing, advising claim to profession, so we spend a lot of time on that, so but there are also people on that committee who very strongly feel that they are professional, right, that their practice is professional, so we talked a lot about that word, both as perceived by practitioners and definitionally various ways to define profession, but what that got us to is some recommendations made to Nakata leaders about what they can do to help us move towards both of those, both the practitioner perception and helping to strengthen that, and to do the some of the things that are needed to actually have like a definitional profession. Another aspect that we spent quite a bit of time, and that some of our individual task force members brought out was really recognizing the dual role that advisors have of representing the institution while also supporting individual students, and recognizing that there are times when that might come into conflict, and clarifying where is the advisor's responsibility now that starts to point towards at codes of ethics and things like that, but in our scope of practice we have defined that there is this relationship and that we are working with an individual student within the bounds of our institutions, yeah, another is, and we heard this from our member feedback, loud and clear, as well. It was about advisor working conditions, like each of us works at a different kind of institution and different kinds of roles, so people were able to contribute in different perspectives to what makes it harder for an advisor to meet the standard, and some of the realities of institutional constraints and expectations that we might be writing into this definition.

Matt Markin  
Definitely, huge kudos to you and the task force members for this, for this happening. I mean, it was a long road, but I'm glad that it ended up working out. Now, for you personally, is there a part of the definition that you believe might be most affirming for advisors who may have felt misunderstood or undervalued before.

Janet Schulenberg  
I hope so. I think calling out the distinctive knowledge they possess and naming it as important to higher education, I hope that that is affirming to advisors, and I hope that that set of institutional responsibilities that says it's the institution's responsibility to seek and use that expertise will be helpful in empowering them. So I hope that it helps advisors who might be under supported recognize that this is why they're feeling the way they do, that it's not like I don't want individual advisors to feel less worthy for working in conditions that do not permit achieving the full goals and responsibility, so I'm hoping that this can be empowering to advisors who are working in those under supported conditions to recognize that this is not their personal failing, that that that their institution needs to also step in and support them, so I really do hope that it empowers them to point out what needs to change for things to be different and lend some weight to the recommendations.

Ryan Scheckel  
I know folks who are involved in the publication of any type of professional or scholarly text come think about the reading of it differently, but have you taken some time to envision how advisors and institutions might read it, and then start rethinking current practices now that this formal definition exists.

Janet Schulenberg  
Yes, I mean, I hope that advisors will see themselves in this definition and the responsibility sections, and I hope that institutional leaders will start to question some of their assumptions about academic advising and its role at the institution. So, Ryan, are you asking how they. Might they might rethink some of the ways they've been engaging,

Ryan Scheckel  
yeah, like it's out there now, and they can use it as a kind of comparison set or mirror or framework schema to evaluate our is what we're doing right now in any kind of alignment with this positional aspirational document.

Janet Schulenberg  
Yep. Well, I guess going back to the very beginning here, like I think that there's nothing in this definition that is shocking in any possible way. Like, I really don't think that anything that's in this set of responsibilities is something that people haven't already recognized is something that should be happening, even if it isn't happening. So I hope that when people look at this, they see the things that they're already doing and can feel affirmed that they're, they're doing good work. I also hope that where they see it's not quite meeting up that they deserve more, they deserve more support and more advocacy. I also hope that institutional leaders will question their assumptions about academic advising. Right, so sometimes think about the progression into a leadership position. A lot of times folks come up through faculty lines where maybe they advised right as part of their work, but what - what was their training in that advising? What was their support and reward for it? What was their full under.. what did they have the opportunity to develop a full understanding of what it actually should be? And then are they moving into leadership positions where they're open to having a different conception of what academic advising is, other than what they experienced or did themselves, so I really hope that this helps institutional leaders again question their assumptions about academic advising, right, and and to make some changes in how they're supporting people, so there's also I hope that it leads people to question some of the assumptions they make about what should be included in new advisor training, for example, like, is it enough to tell new faculty how the gen ed curriculum works, call it, call them trained to be advisors, right? I think that's some institutions, that's that's what's happening. Is it fair to think they're ready to meet the responsibilities of advising? Is it fair to students for that? So, I hope it helps to align some advice, advisor responsibilities to the core competencies that one needs in order to be a good advisor with the institutional supports that advisors need to meet those those core competencies and responsibilities, and then how that relates to student learning and their patterns of outcomes. In the end, there should be there's a through line here, and hopefully this starts to give us a framework to make that more explicit. All right, and so finally, I think what I hope this leads to is us being able to more directly explain why there's a correlation between academic advising and things that the institution wants to count, like turn term to term student retention, right? That it's not happening by accident, it's happening by advisors meeting these responsibilities and the effect that that has on students, right, and the next decisions that they make. So, hopefully that through line can become a lot more clear, and we can lay better claim to it.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, and maybe expanding on Ryan's question, your answer to that. Let's say, with this definition, how can advisors maybe use that definition if maybe they're asked to absorb more responsibilities without more support, or even let's say within advising teams, is there anything that maybe advising directors, you know, any conversations they should be having with their teams now that this definition exists.

Janet Schulenberg  
Yeah, so this definition lays out what's within the scope of responsibilities for advisors, which creates the possibility for advisors to say something is not in that circle of responsibilities, so maybe it doesn't mean that there's not expected to do this additional thing, but at least lets them stand on solid ground and point out the ways that they're being asked to do less advising in the name of something else, so it might not prevent that additional duty from being required, but there is like at least a moral high ground to stand on with this endorsement from the professional association. What advising is and what is additional. I also think it's realistic that we all have additional responsibilities in addition to advising, that it's the institution's responsibility to make sure that those are in balance. With each other, and I think that's maybe the place for a fruitful conversation. What is the balance? Then I think advice advising directors could use this by asking their advisors where they feel they're already well able to meet these responsibilities and where they feel under prepared or under supported to do it, so what are the kinds of things they could be collaborating on to identify places for some incremental improvement, right? So small wins add up to really big change, right. We've seen that in the association. I think about where we were in 2008 compared to now, like the kind of scholarship that we're writing is completely different, like lots of people coming together to say similar things leads to big change, like little things adds up. So, I think that that's one of the places where this can go, is small incremental changes can lead to big changes down the line.

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, definitely. I think the framework that the definition prevents of what is within the scope and definition, and what might be outside of it, as you said, won't perhaps change the position that someone is hired in, but it is a step in a direction that can lead to important conversations, and one of the things that we've heard is especially around the years of the pandemic, and state legislatures trying to find ways to support students who are navigating the challenges of, you know, not being in person for a significant component of their education, they saw we see success coaching and academic advising initiatives sort of blend a little bit and the words start get to use interchangeably, so Where do you see the clearest boundaries between academic advising, success coaching, career counseling, financial aid, mental health counseling? Where do you see those lines being drawn?

Janet Schulenberg  
Okay, so I think academic advising, I think of it as the center of a Venn diagram, but I'm biased, right? So, but it is a structured, institutionalized, ongoing relationship for every single student, that's how that should be. So, in that sense, it, it is in the center, because it's something that should be available to every single student who comes to our institutions. Not every student is going to need success coaching, not every student will need mental health counseling, right? But, but every student deserves the chance to make sense of their educations and to be be thoughtful about how they're engaging with it. Okay, so I think success coaching, it's been used interchangeably with academic advising. When a success coach has the duties of an academic advisor, they're actually an academic advisor, and they have all those responsibilities. If calling them success coaches allows the institution to pay them better, great, but they still are an academic advisor in other institutions. Success coaching is more, more targeted, like it's oriented around helping a student to meet a specific goal that the student has set using specific coaching techniques to achieve that purpose. So, in that, like, a coaching might be a technique that some advisors use with some students, or it might be a specialized role that is where specifically trained individuals are playing that role for some students, but it's different, right, from from academic advising, which helps every student make sense of their educations and navigate their educations, you know, same for financial aid, that's professional guidance for students and families for how to pay for their post-secondary education. Mental health counseling, oh my goodness, altogether different. Licensed profession, professional practice, right? Helping individuals navigate emotional, psychological, behavioral challenges, right. So, all of those are about people, and they all might be needed by a single student. And because students, students are complex human beings, where different parts of their lives are not compartmentalized, and don't, right, they all affect each other. We need to recognize these different needs in a student, be respectful of those boundaries as we approach them, but not practice outside of our expertise. So, Marie Lyndhurst used to say we're messing around with people's lives, and, like, I.. I.. she's one of the first things she said to me, and it's something I think to myself every single day as I work with students. We need it. What we do matters to individual people, and so we need to do it with the intentionality it deserves. And part of that intentionality is respecting the boundaries between these different areas of expertise and playing that role of connecting students to that specialized role when needed.

Matt Markin  
And then speaking of like role. And responsibilities, like you've already mentioned, talked a little bit about with the scope of practice, what institutions are kind of going to be, or what institutions are responsible for. Can you expand a little bit more on that now that there is this new definition?

Janet Schulenberg  
Yeah, I really hope that it gives advising leaders a foundation to stand on, other than whatever local influence and respect they've gained, right. So I'm going to guess that advising leaders at institutions have been advocating for institutional supports like those that are outlined here, and so hopefully this lends some weight to their arguments, you know. You know how, like, you make a recommendation to a student, and they keep not taking it, but then they go and meet with some other advisor, and they come back and say, this advisor told me this amazing thing, like I wish I'd known to do that earlier, like it's a whole entirely new idea, so maybe that'll happen for some of us, right, that just this outside entity saying something that's been now familiarized might actually resonate, right? Or maybe institutions will - this is, would be better - maybe institutions will recognize the expertise that they already have on their campuses and start to leverage that expertise a little bit, little bit more, you know. I hope it also can lead to institutions doing things like maybe, maybe stuff that's already happening informally, but codify that there should be an academic advisor playing a role in curriculum committees. There should be academic advisor representation and faculty senate committees, or in creation of policy and procedure. Right, that this is something that would be beneficial to the entire institution.

Ryan Scheckel  
So, thinking of the entire institution, should students ever see this definition? And if so, how would this be translated for them, if at all?

Janet Schulenberg  
I'm not sure it needs to be translated, and students absolutely need to know what they should expect from academic advising. So, I guess if I were to translate it, I would say students should expect their academic advisor to know them as a person to, to want to know them as a person, you know what their what are their interests and their strengths and their aspirations, and to trust that that advisor is not going to judge them for making mistakes as they learn how to learn. Hopefully, that's that's in these clearly, clearly findable in this set of responsibilities, I would hope that students could be expecting a partner who understands the system and who will challenge them when they need to be challenged, and that the advisor will respectfully tell them the truth, even when it's not something the student wants to have be true, right, that when an advisor delivers bad news, it's not because the advisor doesn't like the student or doesn't know what they're doing, right, that they are trustworthy individuals who respect that student enough to tell them the truth. So I also think that students should have a similar baseline experience with advising in every instance as they move through their educations, so there's a similar baseline that they should, they should expect, and that's one of the set of responsibilities that institutions have, is to ensure that there's some minimum, minimum expectation across all the different advising that a student might encounter, you know, and underlying that, for all that to happen, the student needs to be an active participant, right. So we can't have a relationship, we can't have trust without some of it coming both directions. But it starts with the advisor. Advisors control that can control themselves. So what an advisor does to set that stage is what our responsibility

Matt Markin  
is. So, Janet, going along with that, I guess, does the definition of scope imply any responsibilities for students within that advising relationship

Janet Schulenberg  
beyond reciprocated partnership and participation? No, no, I don't think it does. I think that this leaves room for institutions to define how they want their students to be engaging with academic advising. We discussed that's one of the pieces of input that we heard from members, this they would like to see that set of student responsibilities, but I think that that needs to be a local decision, beyond students need to actually participate, right, and engage.

Ryan Scheckel  
So, as we've been talking through this, you know, my brain is immediately going to ways to operationalize this, to evaluate it, to, you know, report. Report and conduct inquiry around it, but how do you think you would know whether the definition is actually making a difference?

Janet Schulenberg  
Think there's different ways to know, right? So one of the ways that I self manage is by playing the long game, so I'm looking for small incremental wins. So, in at my institution, for example, if this is working, we'll start to see some standard expectations across different advising structures. We have at my institution every possible delivery model of academic advising, we would start to see some common expectations, and people being held responsible to meet those expectations. I think in other places we might see case loads start to change to something that's realistic across the industry, that those really large numbers would be more shocking outliers than the norm. I think we were, would be making a difference at scale if we start to see career ladders for academic advisors more widely implemented, and the ability for people to stay in their positions and be promoted for their expertise rather than for taking on additional things that are not academic advising. I think we'll know we're making a difference when we see higher education leaders starting to talk about the role of academic advising in ways that go beyond, you know, the thank you for what all you do is so important, where they can say in more particular ways, how advising matters, and more legitimately support it through the actions of structures, so that will take time, right, at scale, that will take time, but incremental change leads to change,

Matt Markin  
and I guess now that there is the formal definition and scope for academic advising, it's not like all right, that's it, jobs done, is what's what's next for whether it's for you, the task force, whether it's for Nakata, what's next now that this definition and scope are here.

Janet Schulenberg  
Well, so the task force has completed their work, so we put forward a definition and scope of practice, and the board has accepted it. So, other than the times I'm being asked to talk about it, like we have, we have done that piece of the work. I think the next really is up to the association and what they choose to do with it. I think we can see that they are making good on it. We see, for example, Kyle Ross, the executive director for NACADA, already talking about caseloads as a priority, already talking about some of the ways that institutions have prioritized academic advising in a way that that meets the spirit of this definition, and then how it's helping them to meet their institutional goals, so I think you know that's the kind of work that needs to start after this, and there's, you know, infinite numbers of other ways to go, but I was glad to see that that the caseloads was one of the initial things taken up as a result of this work, because that's one of the needs that we heard the loudest from our member feedback. Another place where I, I hope we will see some more development from Nakata and from people practicing within the field. We already have a lot of professional development about how we do our work, like how we relate to students and things like that, but I think what we need next is more help in advocating and influencing higher education. So academic advisors do sit in positions of influence, it's informal influence most of the time, right? Like we can, we can cause change by our consistent, our consistency. For example, beating the drum, eventually other people will pick up that same pattern, right? Or by the respect that we've earned at our institutions, we can make a difference, but are there things that the professional association can do to help us further develop that that skill set to better recognize it to better leverage it, so I'm hoping that that that's not a new avenue for some professional development and some scholarship within the field of advising,

Matt Markin  
there's always more to do, but I am glad that you know last year we had this episode. It was like, hey, this definition is a work in progress, we're getting there. I'm glad that we got to have this episode to be like, it's done, it's already unveiled, but there's always going to be something more after this. But Janet, thank you so much. For being on the podcast and joining us today.

Janet Schulenberg  
Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan Scheckel  
Thanks, Janet.