Learning Through Supervised Practice in Student Affairs (review)

This book focuses on a defining experience for the emerging student affairs professional-the supervised practice. This text targets the troika of main players in this powerful educational experience: master's level graduate students, faculty advisors and site supervisors, and could be affectionately titled: "Supervised Practice in Student Affairs for Dummies." This book strives to be the one-stop shopping for all of your supervised practice needs, from soup to nuts, and succeeds over the course of six chapters:

1. 1. Foundations of the Supervised Practice Experience: Definitions, Context and Philosophy;

2. 2. Structure and Design of the Supervised Practice Experience;

3. 3. Supervision: Relationships that Support Learning;

4. 4. Application of Theory in the Supervised Practice Experience;

5. 5. Legal and Ethical Issues; and,

6. 6. Evaluating the Supervised Practice Experience.

The authors cast a wide net with a sure hand, carefully crafting a book that can address any issue related to supervised practice through the whole life cycle of the experience, no matter what one calls it (i.e. internship, practicum, etc.), wherever the graduate program may be housed on a given campus, where the practice site is located, the type of supervisor, or range of responsibilities.

The strength of this book is its gimlet-eyed look into the professional world that students will soon inhabit. The reality is that the student affairs workplace is an organic entity where pat black and white answers are replaced by the thousand shades of gray of questions. New professionals are tempered in the flames of these purposeful experiences where the conceptual meets the concrete, theory meets practice, and the ideal meets the real in a whirl that can careen from excitement to confusion. More than at any other point in the student's education, everything counts and it is live. For persons to manage these multiple, often competing priorities and questions, they need to be an 'integrated student affairs professional," which the authors offer as equal parts life experience, attitudes and values, theoretical knowledge, applied knowledge, practical and technical skills, social and interpersonal skill and professional ethics.

Given the attention the authors devoted to creating an engaging learning experience, the book practices what it preaches. Numerous reflection questions and exercises punctuate most chapters, as do many helpful worksheets in the appendices. While it can be read front to back, it has self-contained chapters that can be useful to the most harried practitioners. This book also has the added benefit of being applicable to those who supervise undergraduate student workers—many of the techniques can be applied to the para-professional positions in my own office.

The two small drawbacks of this book are venal not mortal. The book is exhaustive, but also can be a bit exhausting. Like a movie that feels like it has one too many endings, the comprehensiveness of this volume can seem a bit much. The other issue is this book is largely written towards the graduate student, but sometimes the focus shifts to the faculty advisor or on-site supervisor without warning and can cause slight confusion about the intended audience.

This book makes several worthy contributions to the field. Supervised practice and theory to practice has long been a focus in the professional literature (Argyris & Schön, 1974), and several authors of this already text have made significant contributions to this literature base (Winston, Creamer, & Miller, 2001). Given the remarkably broad and deep scholarly and professional experience of the authors, the text not only provides current state of the supervised practice art, but in many ways is the culmination.

Another important contribution to the field is that the text addresses the issue of knowledge creation and application itself in student affairs. Though most student affairs professionals have graduate degrees, scholarly knowledge is produced by relatively few individuals (Brown, 1998). There are many calls for scholar-practitioners for those who engage in the scholarship of practice (Carpenter, 2001), but...