Examining the Professionalization of Advising - Adventures in Advising

In Ep 89, we chat with Dr. Craig McGill, assistant professor at Kansas State University. Craig discusses grounded theory, knowledge creation within the professionalization of academic advising, and the untapped research and scholarship potential of primary role advisors. This week's episode is guest hosted by Ryan Scheckel from Texas Tech University.  

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Welcome back to the adventures in advisor podcast. This is Matt Markin, and we are episode 89. And since the podcast returned back in May of this year, I have not had any guest hosts. So well that changes today is we bring back returning guests returning hosts and all around great guy and friend of the pod, Ryan Scheckel from Texas Tech University. Ryan, take it away.

Ryan Scheckel  
Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me back. And it's great to have another a friend of the podcast on as an interviewee again, I know Craig has interviewed some folks and I think we're maybe finding our footing with this podcast modality. But I want to introduce Dr. Craig McGill. He's an assistant professor for the department of special education, counseling and student affairs at Kansas State University. He holds a doctorate from Florida International University in Adult Education and Human Resource Development. Dr. McGill is a quantitative qualitative researcher, qualitative researcher focused on social justice and the professionalization of academic advising. And he has also published articles within fields of musical theater studies and queer studies, Craig has given almost 60 advising related presentations at Mikado state regional annual and international conferences. And his publication record consists of two co edited books and over 30 peer reviewed articles. Again, welcome, Craig. 

Craig McGill  
Thank you so much, Ryan. And Matt, very excited to be here this afternoon.

Ryan Scheckel  
we had the sort of the joy of revisiting episodes to prepare for, for interviews, and I was honored to be on what was edited into the first episode of the podcast in its first iteration. And you were part of the second but it was functionally the same day for Matt. It was in Louisville and 2019 interviewing folks at the annual conference there. I didn't know that. Yeah. And so we were part of the first set of content. And we've been in a lot of places together and haven't really had too many opportunities to just have conversations, one on one lot of great group discussions and stuff. So I'm glad for this opportunity. And for this time. Yeah. So in your previous appearances on the podcast, there have been some topics of discussion that weren't really a focus, but just sort of talking about your journey and your experience in academic advising and, and how you've moved from institutions and roles and, and I wanted to pick apart some of those and maybe give them their own focus. You have spent some time talking about your scholarship and your collaboration with others and producing scholarship on the topic of the professionalization of academic advising. And since it's been a while since you're on talking about that, specifically, I was wondering if you could update us sort of where you're at with that conversation, maybe where the conversation stands for the field. Where are we at with professionalization and academic advising?

Craig McGill  
Oh, that's great. Yeah, professionalization is is really important for us. And it's, it's a, it's, it's an umbrella that covers a lot of different things that are important for us as a field to consider. And so some of those we're going to be talking about today, I think we still have a PR problem as a field, I think we have not convinced higher ups of the importance and value of the work that advisors do. And so that is why I am so passionate about about this. And even though I'm a faculty member now, you know, maybe some of the viewers will know that I was a primary role advisor for nine years. And I just knew that the work we were doing was more important than the recognition that we were being given by various stakeholders. And so I'm a little bit surprised that, you know, I've been in the field for maybe 15 years at this point. And we've come so far, but I don't think the progress has been sufficiently recognized. And so I think the professionalization umbrella helps us to do that. It helps us to think about what it means to be an advisor. What does it mean to have case loads that are 500, 700, a 1000. How can we have meaningful conversations with students with that type of a caseload? And the only way to address this, I think, is to convince those higher ups who have the capacity to just shape the caseload size. So that advisors, you know, have, you know, the space and the resources to have those meaningful conversations with students. Because what it means As we lose very talented people who come in and you know aren't able to, to give the thoughtful practice that they have the capacity for, but in their current roles don't have the ability to perform. So that's, that's the main thing I would say about this. And so this involves research and publication, we need to demonstrate empirically effectiveness, we need to demonstrate need, empirically and otherwise. And we need to be publishing in venues outside of our own. Our own venues are very important place as well. But if we want to reach other audiences, we need to be publishing in higher education journals writ large. And so I really haven't started anything new since I appeared last most of of, of what I'm working on now is continuing the work. I've started with just a variety of collaborators. So and I think also, just another thing we need to acknowledge is I've said empirical like 700 times. But there are other ways of knowledge, Gration, and I think the quantitative stuff is very important, but it's not the only route. 

Ryan Scheckel  
And for our listeners who are listening to Craig, for that, maybe the first time here, I do want to encourage you to go back and find previous episodes, where Dr. McGill is talking about the research and the work and the scholarship and the publication in the knowledge. In particular, one of the threads that I heard in listening to your previous appearances was this idea about multiple ways of knowing the value that is inherently there. And again, it wasn't a feature or a focus of any of the conversations. But it was a through line in when talking about where academic advisors come from, sort of our academic identities and our academic academic backgrounds. And then the fit or alignment or miss fit or alignment when we're working with students may be outside of those. But the value of multiple ways of knowing is a part of, I think, your philosophical center, as a scholar. And I'm, I'm curious if we could talk a little bit just a bit in the middle of this discussion about professionalization, about your background with music theory, and advising in a STEM field, when when you're doing that having that academic preparation? 

Craig McGill  
I love that. And I don't know what this is what you're referring to. But my advising career started advising biochemistry in forensic science, which I loved. I thought that was so fun. And I learned so much about those fields, not necessarily in terms of anything beyond a layman's understanding of the concepts in the field, but learning to have conversation with people working in these fields, and preparing students to work in these fields. Yeah, music theory. This is a fun anecdote. My one of my mentors in the field is Dr. Peter Hagen, just just a wonderful man. And we were talking about music. And he encouraged me to think about pieces of music that I thought every advisor should, should listen to. And I don't know that I have a satisfactory response at this point. But it got me thinking more about the interdisciplinarity of our work. And thinking about how what I learned in music theory could translate to to advising students and thinking through some of these things. And, you know, I think these are important conversations to think about individually, but also with our students, and thinking about the transferable skills, how does, you know, outlining the harmonic scheme of a sonata prepare me to do X, Y, or Z in the real world? And there's, there's a, there's many musicians and NACADA. And I think it would be fun at some point, just have a meeting with them about, you know, how has music, you know, prepared you for for this wonderful field. But yeah, it's a fun question. I don't know that I have an answer today, but...

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, well, you should be working on the playlist at minimum, because there will be listeners. My experience has been, especially when we're kicking around and maybe popular culture, visual media and the arts, that there's a lot of traction there. And there have been, of course, scholars who have articulated why. And I think that, that for my professional journey and engaging with scholarship, I don't know that anyone necessarily needs to legitimize their convictions, and their certainties about the nature of the work that we do. But it is really wonderful when an expert in a field who has devoted their time to exploring these concepts says, Yeah, this is why it works. Yeah, I can assure you that the transferrable skills, perspectives and at minimum, the metaphors even though analogies and metaphors sometimes work against our goals in professionalization, they're there for sure. So if someone's like, yeah, that we should have a playlist for advisors? We absolutely should. So just a little bit, again, given our time, what does continuing the research look like?

Craig McGill  
I think one of the things we need to think about is its primary role advisors. I mean, this isn't anything new. But I think it's a continued issue. primary role advisors have so much to offer observations they see in their own practice, stuff from their own academic training, even that is untapped. For the research, I have the luxury of being in a faculty position where I'm evaluated on research as part of my job. But most people in the field are not in that position. And so we need to figure out ways of making scholarship in conducting scholarship more possible. And I think that is directly related to the first thing I said about our PR issue. And, you know, going to Troxel's work on scholarly advising, you know, thinking about how we not only perform scholarly advising, that how do we convey the message that advisors are scholar practitioners, and need not only training and opportunities, but actual time time is a resource just as much as anything? You know, I often say I never would have left my advising rule had, I'd been able to do research and have accounted as part of that. But you know, I was doing it on evenings and weekends, and that's just not sustainable. So I think we need to think through how we make that possible for primary role advisors. And one thing I would like to see is, how can we pair it primary role advisors with perhaps faculty advisors on on campuses, who do have the training, who have the job expectation of doing research, and who have the ability? In some cases, this is the most important thing to be a primary investigator, sorry, PII for the IRB is on their campus, how can we build these partnerships or help build these partnerships? I think that might be one solution, to get more research conducted on college campuses. So I think that that's, go ahead. 

Ryan Scheckel  
No, I was just gonna say that, among the sort of the thoughts that lead in that question is there are structures, structures that have to be in place to continue one's research one's line of inquiry? Certainly, when primary role advisors get to the point where they're like, Yes, I'm going to act on this question that's been raised. And I'm going to pursue this line of inquiry towards something that leads to presentation and publication, collection of information, data, whatever you want to call it perspectives for the research, that the effort alone to sort of navigate break through overcome those structural barriers, is one of the things that maybe keeps the next step from happening. And I'm guessing that in your role at K-State, because you're in that faculty role, that continuing your line of inquiry, continuing to collaborate with fellow researchers is part of the day the normal part of your structure now that can become part of a primary role advisors structure, but there are there are other barriers to making that so including the the caseload and the expectation and support and permission that time And then also the actual the positional authority to connect, right? 

Craig McGill  
That's a really good point. We can't accomplish this solely through what I'm about to say. But what I'm about to say might be a small part of the solution is encouraging folks who are going for doctoral or terminal degrees to consider doing advising topics. If they're working as an advisor, and to convince their you know, their their doctoral supervisor, that advising research is not only possible, but necessary. And so I've had that opportunity through students going through through our PhD program. Now, obviously, our PhD Program is an academic advising. So the topics are going to be academic advising. However, myself and several other people have gone through doctoral programs that weren't academic advising. And I've done academic advising topics. And so anybody out there listening who's thinking about this, I would encourage them to maybe consider contributing to our knowledge base, you know, as along your journey of doctoral coursework.

Ryan Scheckel  
And speaking of graduate education... Well, that was, you know, another part of the sort of through lines of conversation and your previous appearances, is your work in analyzing and looking into the graduate education and the coursework around academic advising at least in the United States and North America. And I'm kind of curious, again, for those who maybe didn't read the publications or haven't been in the presentations like I was, is there anything that you found? Or that was an interesting takeaway? Or is there anything new in the world of graduate education, academic advising, that you would like to share here?

Craig McGill  
Yeah, so many thoughts. So I'll start with my kind of my own interests. So I did our the program for which I'm faculty now, I went through the Graduate Certificate in 2008, and the graduate master's degree in 2010. I'm now faculty for that program. And we are examining the program itself now. Because you know, the field, the scholarly base of academic advising has absolutely come so far, when you think about the 2008, which was the second edition of the handbook of academic advising, that now is several books. And so we've just branched out in so many important ways. And we need to be thinking about academic advising now, as an academic discipline. I have I continue to come back to and I think it was just an editorial, that , when they wrote about thinking about academic advising as an academic discipline, I think it was really important forward thinking that they were doing, it's taken a while for the field to kind of catch up to that. But that was followed by Shaffer's the professionalization, not just Shaffer, but Shaffer et al professionalization of academic advising in 2010. And they found that there was an issue with with schooling and academic preparation for working in a profession. But so so that's kind of where where my interest in this has started. It actually started before I was faculty at Kansas State University. And so one of the first conversations I had with my department chair is, okay, I'm faculty for this program, which was the first master's degree and the first PhD in advising. I'm not sure if we can say where the first certificate or not, I think Sam Houston may have been, you know, early on there, too. But so I'm faculty for this. Now, if I am successful in what I am doing to promote a culture of professionalization of academic advising, there are going to be more competitors, or graduate certificates and master's programs. And I sort of had to get her like, not because she expected it, but I felt I needed to get her okay with this, like, I'm encouraging more competition is, you know, that that might be antithetical to our goals in terms of, you know, our own program. And she said, Absolutely not. You know, that's your research agenda. It's important, and this is what you need to do. So we are seeing an increase of graduate certificates, not only across the country, but you know, starting to pop up in other countries too. And I think there were, I don't remember exactly, maybe 12 to 15 graduate certificates. At the time we wrote the article. And the article is, is a case study. It's a bit it's a different type of case study. Normally, when you think of case study, you're thinking of a program something that's bounded. We actually were articulating the boundedness of the case study around an idea Excuse me rather than a particular program. So the article looks at data from leaders in the field of advising about the notion of graduate education, you know, considering things like, Do we think everybody should have a certain preparation to do academic advising? I have a degree in advising. Do we think that, you know, if they don't that disqualifies them? If there is a program in academic advising, do we want this some sort of standardization across these programs? So this is very early thinking about these issues. And my own personal view is that there's too much value to people coming from different backgrounds to force everybody to have a degree in academic advising, to practice advising. But I do think it's something that we should consider in terms of thinking about, do we want a common understanding? Do we want some sort of standardization, whether it's, you know, a, you know, a micro credential, whether it's some sort of certification. So, we are seeing a number of programs develop, just within the last actually, as that piece was going to publication, I was notified of a second master's program out of Rowan University in New Jersey. And, you know, as somebody who's faculty for this, you might think my response would be Oh, no, but I was actually very excited that that there are more programs coming in this because I am, I'm passionate about this field, I think that more and more people are interested in thinking about academic advising as a discipline. And once we think about academic advising as a discipline as an academic discipline, the next thought is training, academic training in such a discipline, I think, I think we're gonna see another PhD program at some point in academic advising. And that, to me, is very exciting.

Ryan Scheckel  
And one of the things that I've heard you talk about before, is this idea that the opportunities if you want to call them outlets, or channels, or spaces, or whatever you call them, the more there are, the more opportunity there is for discourse, yes, for conversation, perhaps even disagreement. And whether the conversation disagreement debate or discourse leads to similar kind of consistency in perspective or not, I know is a concern of the professionalization question, are we are we moving the understanding of ourselves, and understanding of advising by others forward to the level of respect and place and all of the sort of markers of a profession? One of the things that you developed in your work is this grounded subsequent theory with a model that explains in a sort of general sense what academic advising can be, or perhaps should be? And I again, I know, a lot of folks are familiar with the work. But I'm kind of curious, you know, since publishing and putting out a visualization of a model of advising and a sense of a theory of academic advising, what's the response been? What is your experience been with having that out in the world?

Craig McGill  
Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. And I'm glad you brought up before I go there, I'm glad you brought up disagreements, it is so important for us to be able to disagree with one another, to be able to have constructive conversations. I think advisors by nature are very friendly, agreeable people. And there is this temptation to think like, oh, no, if I disagree with someone, that's a problem. Both Ryan and I have been part of the I always get this name wrong, theory, philosophy and history of advising think community, and we are a group of people who who not only are okay with disagreeing, but actually welcome it, because it leads to, you know, transformative thinking or challenging us to, you know, to further grow. And so, I would like to encourage other advisors to think about disagreeing respectfully as being okay. And as being important to advancing the field forward. And so, one of the one of the ways that leads to this grounded theory is is thinking about advising and whether there needs to be a common purpose of advising or not, that is something that is discussed at length and the professionalization literature is whether there's a common theory or common purpose, even if it differs in certain settings in small ways, but maybe kind of have a universal agreement about what's the The core or the essence of the nature of the work that we do. And so as I was, is doing my dissertation work, you know, I studied broadly the professionalization of academic advising. So my participants discussed lots of different things a career ladder, which is something we could also talk about, you know, graduate coursework, and this the purpose of advising. And so from this model, or from this dissertation data, I was able to kind of put together what I was seeing as a model of the academic advising process. So grounded theory, as a methodology seeks to articulate a process. That's sometimes misunderstood. But that's what the what a grounded theory is doing. And so I wanted to visualize a process. And so my model consists of four different stages. And the first stage is representing the advisor as a caring institutional representative, and the advisee. And that space being a place of connection. And it is only through that space of connection, that anything productive can happen after that, which also goes back to the importance of caseload size, and being able to have that time and space to develop the report and the relationship with the student. And so from that place of connection, students will grow and develop as they synthesize with their advisor, their experiences. And as they do that, it will lead to a place of decision making where they need to make a decision, the decision can take place, either within the advising context itself, or as the result of the advising experience. And from that leads to action or acting, as I call it, and acting on those decisions. And other experiences that the students are going to have outside of that. And this all leads in my kind of idealized version of academic advising, to helping the student create an academic identity development. And so the most important question, I believe, advisors can ask students are actually to, who do you want to be? And how do you want to live your life? I think those are the two questions that are at the core of advising. And how can we get to that if we're so focused on lifting holds, or, you know, explaining, you know, sometimes explaining a policy is important. But I think too often, it's that informational aspect that is stressed. And it's not always the advisors fault. In fact, it's rarely the advisors fault, because they have so little time. And these are the things that need, you know, need to be covered. But I think that's where we get to the PR problem with advising. And we need to really think creatively about the really important work that we do. And I think it comes down to those two questions. 

Ryan Scheckel  
So, a lot of your work in scholarship and publication, but also in presentation and your involvement in professional organizations is collaborative. And another sort of through line of your conversations in the podcast have been about the folks that you've gotten to work with the people who've made a difference for you mentoring and guiding and influencing you. And I'm kind of curious if you could reflect a little bit here on any particular folks who've mattered a lot, or who's had experiences with you that really propelled or shifted or influenced your direction? 

Craig McGill  
Absolutely. The first name I'll mention is, as maybe many readers know, is Leigh Shaffer. I had the absolute pleasure of getting to know Leigh Shaffer on on a personal level, just about a year or two before his untimely death. And I will always be forever grateful that I was able to meet with Leigh Shaffer and anything I do, you know, I reflect he, I mean, he's the dad figure I've actually lost my own father to and my own mother. But Leigh Shaffer, when I when I'm thinking through the scholarly questions and the the accomplishments and things I've published about professionalization, it's like I want to ring Leigh Shaffer up on the phone. So reading his article in 2010, changed the absolute direction of my my life. I was gonna say, my life's work, but actually my entire life too. And it's, you know, has never changed from from examining professionalization. So Leigh has been very important. Mark Lowenstein 's work has been important Peter Hagen and working on this Scholarly Inquiry book with Peter and Samantha Gizerian. That was the easiest project I have ever had. Not in terms of like the difficulty, but it was still rigorous, and we did the work. But in terms of how smoothly that process went, it just was a dream team. So both of them have been very important and influential. Kathleen Shea Smith has been such an important thinking partner with me. We present it together, we've been friends for years, but we actually present it together for the very first time last year. And we've never published together. And both of us think it's absolutely hilarious that we've, you know, been thought partners and good friends all these years. And yet, our work has been kind of in in separate parallel lanes. Jenny Bloom has has just been a wonderful mentor for me. I think her appreciative advising work is so important, I think, thinking from a lens of positivity and strength spaced is is is really important. So, and at the end of the day, my dissertation advisor, I was kind of hungry for learning about publication when I met her, and, and she just fed that monster. And we're still working together Tonette Rocco's her name, we're still working together, to this day. There's been so many others, but these these these people have, have mentored and guided me. And you know, I also have been collaborating with students and newer researchers upcoming in the field. And I've published and written alone, but frankly, it's just not as fun. I am a collaborative animal. And if I can collaborate with somebody, I'm going to do that way before, I'm going to work on something alone.

Ryan Scheckel  
And speaking of one of those collaborations with an up and coming researcher and a student of yours, we were actually had our paper or scholarly papers paired at the Orlando conference, as well as the Portland conference. And so that's been two years in a row that we've been in the same sort of presentation space, having conversations around the scholarship, and, and what I often think of as the big questions of academic advising. And so can you briefly talk about as far as your perspectives on the importance or value of the scholarly paper session type at annual conferences? 

Craig McGill  
I was, I've been so thrilled by the development. I know, you and Wendy Troxel, and others have worked so hard to get this up and going, it is absolutely essential if our field is to grow, to have the scholarly papers. And I'd like to see it expanded. I think we need to be thinking about conference proceedings, thinking about expanding the number of sessions, and the scholars and researchers who are out there with their brilliant thoughts, but that are kind of kept silently in their head, and want to encourage you to come out and to do what needs to be done to share that work. Because that's how we move forward as as as a field. So I have encouraged my PhD students in particular, you know, you're working on your dissertation, it's about advising, you know, let's get a scholarly paper for you going. And so I've worked in particular with Michelle Strowbridge and she is working on her dissertation is examining the experiences of navigating feminism for primary role advisors who identify as women. And she's just having a fabulous time doing this and thinking about this. And one of the things she did was to start thinking about a feminist lens or examining kind of a feminist approach for academic advising. And so there are a number of approaches in advising that are have been articulated, and they're wonderful. What we sort of feel is missing from many of them is thinking about the identity of the advisor, and what the advisor is bringing to the advising session. And so that's where some of these feminist principles are coming into play. And so I hope you'll also mention your paper because it was just an absolute dream that we were paired together and I loved learning about your your work and you know, as discussed, you probably have about three papers or maybe even a book out of that paper.

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, we'll see what happens there. But I will say it is always evident to me that so much of the people doing the talking about academic advice Ising don't look like the people doing the work of academic advising. And that was really the inspiration that led to my, my exploit my exploration of the history of advising, and particularly the role of Dean's of women. And so yes, I was thrilled to one be a part of the scholarly paper session development and that process, but again, shout out to Dr. Wendy Troxel, on her just absolute championing of the importance of that and getting it done, which ating any of those things done can be such a challenge. But then to get there and see that there's a chance we can have two folks talking about feminist perspectives, ways of understanding, ways of knowing academic advising in a in one way that might might connect a bit more with the folks who are primarily doing the work of advising at least in the United States. And so that was really exciting. I know, we have to be mindful of time. As a faculty member, you have class coming up. So one of the things that I will say to our our listeners, is another part of listening to Dr. McGill's appearances on the podcast and reading your work is that a lot of the stuff that you're poking at? Asking questions about problematizing are what I think of as the big questions for academic advising physics as a scientific discipline has this tradition of sort of defining, you know, what should we what should we be working on as scholars in our field? What big questions should we be answering and exploring? And I know that Craig is among those who is illuminating those big questions through his work. But I'm kind of curious if you had one big question you want it answered, set as an agenda for scholars across the world for academic advising? What would it be? 

Craig McGill  
I think I've alluded to it. Why are the sounds like I'm blaming, and I don't mean to be doing that. But maybe what can we do to help others understand the complexity of advising? I think it's such an important question. And I think we have not even even I mean, there's just so much within that question to explore. And many brilliant thinkers before me have explored it as well. I'm thinking of Janet Schulenburg. And Marie Lyndhurst, who wrote just an absolute Pivotal, important article about what advising is, and that was 2008. And we've come a long way. But I think part of that has been siloed. It's been conversations within an echo chamber of people who know what advising is and how important it is. So how do we advance that? How do we improve our PR message to people who have real power to make changes within advising practice? 

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, if Matt will let us do it, maybe there'll be a chance we can have another time together. We talk about those big questions. I know there are folks out there who want to also put their two cents in so you know, reach out. Let us know what your thoughts are about big questions and about the things. Thanks so much, Craig, for your time for your for your collaboration. It's been a pleasure. It's been awesome.

Craig McGill  
Thank you so much.