Leaders' Perceptions of the Professionalization of Academic Advising: A Phenomenography

Abstract

Through the professionalization process, an occupation transforms into a profession. Although much scholarship has situated academic advising as a professional endeavor, in the past few years, the authors of two papers posited that advising is not a profession, a contention not shared by all within the advising community. Despite much scholarly deliberation, advising and the role of it in higher education remains misunderstood by administrators, faculty members, staff, students, and some advisors themselves. Therefore, discussions of professionalizing the field remain both inevitable and imperative. To advance the dialogue, a phenomenography was used to explore the variety of perspectives that NACADA leaders shared about the professionalization of academic advising. Five attitudinal categories emerged: assumptive, presumptive, emerging profession, inferiority complex, and the need for further definition.

Administrator Perceptions of Academic Advisor Tasks

“…Academic advising, once viewed as prescriptive and solely useful for providing curricular information, has grown into a developmental process designed by those who perform advising to develop problem-solving and decision-making skills. Despite these efforts, the field is not clearly defined or practiced consistently in a variety of contexts (Aiken-Wisniewski et al, 2015;McGill, 2018). The lack of clear boundaries and practices leave the day-to-day roles and responsibilities of academic advisors somewhat open to interpretation.…”

“…Yet, academic advising is often misunderstood by higher education leaders who, despite concerns with student persistence, underestimate the work academic advisors do (McGill, 2018). The field of academic advising currently strives for professionalization, a ''process by which a nonprofessional occupation is transformed into a vocation with the attributes of a profession'' (Shaffer et al, 2010, p. 68).…”

Skills and Competencies for Effective Academic Advising and Personal Tutoring

“…The interview transcripts were uploaded into NVivo, a computer qualitative analysis software program to assist with tracking the codes. Data were first approached with open coding and findings from thematic analyses produced articles (McGill, 2018;McGill, undereview). Once these data were organized by themes, participants were given the opportunity to confirm meaningfulness of the themes.…”

Early Journal Articles and Editors That Shaped the Evolution of Scholarly Writing in Academic Advising, 1972-2001

“…As such, this historical perspective on 30 years of academic advisingfocused journal articles does not delve into the much-debated question of whether academic advising is a profession (Grites et al, 2016;McGill, 2019). The authors leave those discussions to scholar-practitioners who provide indepth analysis of professionalization of the field (e.g., McGill, 2018McGill, & 2019Shaffer et al, 2010;White, 2020).…”