Transforming Students: Fulfilling the Promise of Higher Education

5. In the Company of Others

chapter five In the Company of Others We asked Michael Bumbry what the primary contributor was to his growth during his four years at college. “The relationships, many of which I hope will be lifelong. Looking back, I think that’s probably the best thing that I got out of being here, was the people. All those other things kind of follow.” This message was consistent throughout all our interviews with students. Students are not the only ones to feel that the social environment is important to transformation. Many scholars contend that learning has not been truly transformative unless it results in action within a community. In Making Their Own Way (2001), based on a longitudinal study of individuals from college entry into their early thirties, Marcia Baxter Magolda writes about self-authorship. She defines self-authorship as “the ability to collect, interpret, and analyze information and reflect on one’s own beliefs in order to form judgments” (14) and suggests that people must answer three questions along this developmental journey: 1. How do I know? 2. Who am I? 3. How do I want to construct relationships with others? These questions touch on central issues of identity that echo our transformational framework, and the third question is at the heart of this chapter. Our lives are acted out in social contexts. Our changing selves are played out in relation to others. The word “community” speaks to this shared process in its derivation from the Latin communis, meaning service or gift. These social contexts also serve to shape our lives. David Brooks, in an article in the New York Times entitled “The Way to Produce a Person” 82 Transforming Students (June 3, 2013), calls attention to the malleable and adaptive nature of our brains. “Every time you do an activity or have a thought, you are changing yourself into something slightly different than it was before. Every hour you spend with others, you become more like the people around you.” Elon graduate Brian O’Shea talks about the tension he experienced upon his return from his life-changing summer bicycle trip across the country. “When I got back everything was the same as when I left it. I was different but in the same environment again. . . . I learned to take all those relationships that taught me so much over the summer and tried to bring those back here and to help others understand what I learned and the ways that I changed. This either strengthened my relationships with others back on campus or forced a drifting away from some, because I realized that maybe they didn’t have the same morals and ethics that I had in life.” The transformative learning process is an interplay between the individual self and others, in effect in all phases of the process—disruption, reflective analysis, verification. In this interplay, the learner is influenced by the community, which, in turn, shapes the individual. The ultimate outcome of this type of learning is action in community, representative of a commitment to a larger purpose. Transformation, then, has the potential to affect a larger group and to contribute not just of the individual but also of the larger community. Classroom as Community Because community is a powerful force in the transformative process, the attention that a college gives to the creation of community settings that promote positive growth can have a tremendous payoff. The university’s influence on this community begins each year with the admissions process . The existing student body must be familiar enough to attract newcomers but diverse enough to provide a rich potential for dissonance and disequilibrium. Although the academic curriculum may be what we think of as the heart of the university, Baxter Magolda (2001) points out that shared knowledge making, central to self-authorship, is particularly difficult in In the Company of Others 83 the classroom. Academic communities tend to be professor oriented and content driven. The class sizes, schedules, facilities, and other elements of the typical higher education system, she says, are obstacles that make even willing faculty hesitant to shift the pedagogy into shared knowledge making (236). In addition, most students come to college having succeeded in a strongly authoritative—instructor as author instead of student as self-author—educational system, creating an uphill struggle for faculty. There are, however, steps faculty and administrators can take...