Self-Authorship: Advancing Students’ Intellectual Growth (review)

The student outcomes that higher education strives to achieve are ambitious: critical thinking, an appreciation for multiple perspectives, and civic engagement, to name but a few. Increasingly, however, institutions are combatting an onslaught of criticism about levels of student learning. Demands to demonstrate student outcomes have resulted in a troubling trend: a narrow focus on knowledge acquisition as measured by standardized tests of skills.

In Self-Authorship: Advancing Students’ Intellectual Growth, Peggy Mezsaros argues that the goals of the academy “go considerably beyond mere knowledge of subject matter and require a new lens to view learning and teaching in higher education” (p. 5). This monograph provides that lens and is, in effect, a guidebook for institutions seeking to transform themselves and put student learning at the center of their endeavors.

Such transformations must be grounded in theories of intellectual development. In this case, self-authorship (Keegan, 1994, Baxter Magolda, 1999) serves as the theoretical scaffolding. Self-authorship describes the developmental journey that students take as their beliefs about knowledge (epistemology), their relationships with others (interpersonal), and their own identities (intrapersonal) change over time. Development occurs as they move from assuming that knowledge is absolute and relying on others for validation to accepting that knowledge is socially constructed and integrating others’ opinions with their own internal voice.

Meszaros opens the volume by arguing that self-authorship can serve as the catalyst for institutional transformation. She begins by defining intellectual development, learning outcomes, and self-authorship and presents the Learning Partnerships Model (LPM) as the mechanism through which self-authorship can be promoted. The LPM blends cognitive and affective elements of development and is guided by three principles: “validating learners’ capacity as knowledge constructors, situating learning in students’ experience, and defining learning as mutually constructing meaning” (Baxter Magolda & King, 2004, pp. xix–xx).

Chapter 2, by Terry Wildman, eloquently points out that the literature describing development is abundant but that research on how to promote development is much scarcer. He therefore lays the foundation for the remainder of the volume by describing how institutions must change to encourage self-authorship. At the heart of any such accommodation is a shift in the way faculty members teach. That, he artfully points out, is “a learning problem in its own right” (p. 24). Wildman’s discussion of the scripts that instructors develop about teaching and the paradigmatic shift that must occur to move from performance compliance to learning is exceptionally compelling.

The next four chapters offer pragmatic examples of how self-authorship can be integrated into the work of the institution. If student learning is to be central to higher education, it must be measurable. Jane Pizzolato (Chapter 3) describes the psychometric properties of the Self-Authorship Survey, an assessment instrument that consists of both quantitative and qualitative elements and which shows promise of measuring overall development.

Self-authorship in research is the focus of a particularly interesting chapter by Anne Laughlin and Elizabeth Creamer. They describe their study examining self-authorship and career decision-making among adolescent women. The mixed methods they employed led to interesting conclusions about their sample but, perhaps more importantly, to new insights about self-authorship and themselves as researchers.

In Chapter 5, Barbara Bekken and Joan Marie offer a rich description of how to design a multidisciplinary series of courses using the LPM. They aptly illustrate Wildman’s admonition about the degree to which institutional structures constrain the teaching and learning process.

In addition to research and instruction, self-authorship can be promoted through other programs and services on campus, and Marcia Baxter Magolda (Chapter 6) describes several innovative applications of the LPM that campuses have implemented in recent years in honors programs, academic advising, and residence life, among other settings. Meszaros concludes the monograph by summarizing the current state of the self-authorship movement and identifying concrete steps that institutions can take to advance students’ intellectual development.

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