Launching a Thousand Stories: A Review of the Defining and Refining Moments in my Master’s Program
By Ryan Fisher
At the end of my master’s program in higher education administration, I can reflect on how my experiences in this program have provided clarity to my work experiences, exposed the tethers between my professional passions and my personal passions, and allowed me to articulate my personal and professional goals for my career in post-secondary education. This essay captures my current understandings of how my personal beliefs about higher education and professional goals have evolved through the defining and refining moments of my program. In order to emplotten my experiences, I rely on the chronological courses I took and the student learning outcomes I achieved through those courses.
I – Prologue
In May 2012, I graduated from Penn State with a bachelor of arts degree in English with an emphasis in creative writing and a minor in technical writing. At the advice of a mentor, I began working as an administrative assistant in the College of the Liberal Arts office of Outreach and Online Education. This position allowed me to learn about various functions in the unit, including program management, financial structures of universities, and learning design, but the area that fascinated me was program discovery and development.
My first experience with program development resulted from the application of the technical writing skills I cultivated in the English major. Penn State has a complex curricular process and style due to its unique structure as one university, geographically dispersed. My English background allowed me to pick up the style quickly, which made editing course and program proposals for style to be very easy. Part of working on these proposals included adding up credits to try to fit in all of the courses the proposers wanted to use, and also helping faculty search for courses on the books that could best supplement the core of the programs being designed.
Looking back on my undergraduate career, I enjoyed selecting classes for general education program and trying to figure out how to take the classes that I wanted — not necessarily because they supported the regular program of study, but because I was passionate about those courses. I took pride and pleasure in the notion that the courses on my transcripts would reflect my personal interests — and also reflect well on the skills I would need in my future career plans (which, at that point, involved aspirations of being an editor or a creative writer). When I began helping faculty find courses to include in their degree programs, or helping faculty to determine which courses to design for online delivery, I hoped that I would be enabling others to learn the skills they needed for their careers while also pursuing their passions.
After two years in the administrative assistant role, I became more and more involved in program management and curricular support and ended up having less time for general office tasks and support. When I received a promotion to Education Program Associate to focus on assisting with program planning, development, and management, I decided that I should immerse myself in the field of higher education through graduate school in order to become more effective in my position and better support my unit, the College of the Liberal Arts, and Penn State. I chose to attend the M. Ed. Higher Education program at Penn State due to the reputation of the Education Policy Studies department, the professional-focused direction of the program, and the incredibly lucrative staff tuition discount.
II – Submersion in the Higher Education Context
Through fantastic course planning by the program faculty, I began my graduate school experience immersed in acquiring the foundations for study in higher education. The courses I took that first fall — HI ED 490: Careers in Higher Education and HI ED 545: Foundations in Higher Education and Student affairs unbound my notions of higher education from my limited experiences at Penn State. HI ED 545 introduced me to the history of higher education in the United States and abroad and the forces and movements that have shaped the field (and continue to do so). HI ED 490 helped me understand the diverse career possibilities that exist in higher education; but, perhaps more importantly, it gave me a crash course in the importance of academic habits of mind — especially in lifelong learning and reflective practice.
I have always considered myself an eager learner, always wiling to read more and learn new and interesting things. But the first and most important lesson that HI ED 490 showed me was that responsible learning must be targeted. Much of the time learning happens subconsciously — we pick up new ideas about the world and incorporate those ideas on how we live our lives. However, lifelong learning in the professional sense must be targeted. Reading the latest fiction masterpiece or learning how to bake an apple pie are respectable pursuits of lifelong learning, but that leaning must be supplemented by active learning that directly applies to my profession of choice. For this reason, when asked to reflect on the program learning objectives in HI ED 490, I scored myself very low in lifelong learning. I have always been willing to learn new things, but I had never considered active planning to maximize that learning.
The second important outcome to come out of HI ED 490 was understanding the value of reflective practice. As a creative writer, I am very comfortable with rethinking situations from various angles and reflecting on my decisions and practices. In many ways, writing engenders these reflective tendencies. HI ED 490, however, demonstrated to me that one doesn’t learn something when one sits through a lecture and takes notes. One doesn’t necessary learn something when one takes an exam or receives a good grade on a paper — one learns something when one reflects upon the experience of the learning and decides how to incorporate that learning into their practices or habits of mind. Just as the capacity to hear does not mean one is listening, the ability to think about ones actions does not mean that one is reflecting, and active learning occurs when reflection is incorporated into action.
III – The Inciting Incident
My second semester in the program seemed, at the time, like it would be my most important semester in the program. That semester involved taking HI ED 548: Curricula in Higher Education and HI ED 552: Administration in Higher Education, courses that theoretically represented the two most important aspects of my position at Penn State. What I found, however, is that these courses were merely just the springboard for the upcoming experiences in my program.
HI ED 548 provided me with a depth of understanding as to how the notions of “curriculum” have changed over time. This course cemented my underlying philosophy on the purposes of higher education — that higher education serves a noble purpose by helping students achieve the faculties to be more logical, more accepting, and more productive members of society. Seeing how the ideals of a liberal education have grown from classical notions of curriculum and fallen in and out of favor has made me determined to promote the values of a liberal foundation for programs in higher education. This course also introduced me to concepts that I was not quite ready to understand: namely, the role that prior learning experiences from outside the classroom have in the higher education curriculum and the benefits of building a program of study around learning objectives instead of courses.
HI ED 552 provided me with the tools to better understand the interpersonal nature of administration of higher education and the social complexities therein. In this course, I developed an understanding for the needs, expectations, and beliefs of the major parties who work together in support of an institution — namely, the faculty, staff, students, and upper administration. This course impressed upon me the need to understand people’s positions to foster collaboration, and how best to communicate with those parties to accomplish goals. I also had the most productive group discussions and presentations of my academic career in this course, which helped me better understand the importance of teamwork and how to best work with others toward a common goal.
Finally, taking HI ED 548 and HI ED 552 simultaneously also opened my eyes to another important realization: the idea that many internal parties have influence over an institution’s curricula. Colleges and Universities may have complex bureaucratic policies that directly affect its academic plans — such as curricular proposal processes — and others that indirectly impact the students’ experiences of academic plans, such as credit transfer practices. If there are not people looking within the institution to monitor the validity and reliability of these practices, the quality of the academic plans can be in jeopardy. In addition, there was a line in HI ED 552’s textbook regarding curriculum that struck me and has stayed with me ever since — the idea that an institution’s published academic plans are an official statement on the beliefs and values of the faculty and administration of that institution (Hendrickson, et. al, 2013). Once again, forces from all over higher education interact with the curriculum.
IV — The Rising Action — Policy and the Scientific Method
My next two semesters allowed me to delve deeper into different aspects of the role of curriculum in higher education. HI ED 801: Foundations of Institutional Research, introduced me to qualitative methods and quantitative methods of understanding how well an institution is operating, and benchmarking strategies for determining how one institution compares to the other. Throughout this process, I found myself bending assignments to let me think more about curriculum within higher education. For an exercise on qualitative methods, I thought about what it might be like to evaluate an academic program (i.e. a B.A. in Philosophy) by interviewing every faculty member to ask them about what experiences they think an ideal philosophy major should have, and comparing the most common answers to the program as approved by the University Faculty Senate. I was, in essence, asking the right questions in the wrong classes, but my driving preoccupations continued to build. This course provided me with important foundations in quantitative and qualitative skills that I would return to in later semesters.
In Fall 2016, I took two classes that sit somewhat a part from the rest of my academic plan, but which played important roles in the connective tissue within my plan. The first course as HI ED 587: Higher Education Policy and Politics. This course investigated the ways in which laws and politics can influence higher education. The second course was a special-topics course in Assessing Student Learning out of the Department of Curriculum & Instruction (C I 597G). The odd aspect of C I 597G is that is that the course was particularly situated in assessing student learning in the K-12 environment — and, more specifically, in K-12 science programs. I chose to take the course because it didn’t look like HI ED 840: Assessing Student Learning and Evaluating Academic Programs would be offered before I was ready to graduate. Although the context of C I 597G caused some cognitive dissonance, I developed appreciation for important discussions that had happened at the K-12 level in the early 2000s surrounding what students should be learning — including a greater focus on sciences and technology than my precious liberal arts. In addition, this course exposed me to important foundations of assessment, including the roles of formative assessment and summative assessment, and interesting theories on how to best sequence student learning — from the minute level of a single lesson, to the macro level of several years (in high school).
In another serendipitous turn of events, both the assessment course and the policy and politics course put heavy emphasis on examination of policy materials. These courses allowed me to better understand how political policy can sometimes shape an institution’s curriculum through the use of incentives or rewards to encourage certain behavior or through laws prohibiting certain action. I worked on a class assignment with a colleague on how on an upcoming Higher Education Reauthorization Act might be used to encourage states to adopt national state authorization reciprocity agreements, which would allow students to easily transfer credits between member states and the institutions within their borders. Barriers between students transferring credits is harmful to students at this time, as many students are now taking entire degree programs online and it is becoming increasingly uncommon for someone to take all of their credits at one institution. Reciprocity agreements can also help institutions circumvent arcane laws. For instance, due to a law in North Carolina, students living in North Carolina cannot participate in degree programs require students to participate in internships if the home institution does not have a physical presence in the state. Such a policy puts constraining forces on the academic plan an institution may develop, especially if that plan is designed to be offered to students at a distance. Agreements guaranteeing reciprocity for transfer between institutions could effectively sidestep such a regulation.
Both HI ED 578 and C I 597G reinforced the notion that not only can environmental factors within an institution affect the institution’s curricula, but political factors external to the university can affect curricula, too.
V — Climax: The Narrative Revolution
The climax of the defining moment—when everything came together—occurred when investigating narrative inquiry into education. Narrative inquiry is a methodology that has developed from qualitative research studies. Narrative inquiry, essentially, posits the notion that research can be presented in the form of a story (narrative construction), or that a story can be mined for research (analysis of narrative) (Polknghorne, 1988). Furthermore, Pokinghorne (1988) bases his advocacy for narrative inquiry on the notion that humans intrinsically organize and relate information in a narrative fashion—we often ascribe a series of events (random or linked) meaning by crafting a plot that shapes them. To illustrate this, Polkinghorne notes we view each moment in our lives not only in the moment, but with knowledge of past experiences and an expectation for the future. Meanwhile, Connelly and Clandinin (1988) published a book advocating for K-12 teachers to be planning their classroom curriculum based on their experiences, and not having curriculum pressed upon them by outside forces (administrators, government officials, etc). Connelly and Clandinin linked experienced-based inquiry (including narrative inquiry) into the curriculum, but also situated an individual’s experience with curriculum in the same fashion that Polkinghorne (1988) situated narrative-based decision-making. A curricular situation, Connelly and Clandinin argued, not only exists in the moment, but carries the weight of an individual’s previous experiences, and predictions for the future. Therefore, someone make sense of the curriculum in the same way that someone makes sense of their identity, and the way to understand one’s identity happens through the stories they tell about themselves, then it becomes imperative to understand the academic plan through the experienced stories of the students in that space.
Taken together, Polkinghorne, Clandinin, and Connelly allowed me to understand the notion about curriculum that ensnared me at the beginning of this journey — the capacity for an institution’s curriculum to be the foundation for the stories the students tell about their time in higher education, and, returning to Hendrickson, et. al. (2013) the foundation for the stories we tell about the institutions of higher education themselves.
One issue that I confronted at this time was that “curriculum” still seemed too generic to be used to illustrate this concept and refer to consistently. After scouring the references of various books in my collection, I arrived at Lattuca and Stark’s (2009) Shaping the College Curriculum: Academic Plans in Context. In order to capture not only the intended course and study, but also the assessments, instructional interventions, educational context, and social context of an academic program, they offer the term “academic plan.” Academic plan may sound somewhat generic, but once defined as a recursive inclusion of the aforementioned curricular constructs, it serves as a specific terminology to refer to experienced curriculum in the higher education context.
While I was investigating this new [re]turn to narrative, I attended the 2016 national meeting of the American Education Research Association in Washington, D.C. Many of the sessions I attended were part of the narrative inquiry special interest group (SIG), as the class on narrative inquiry was my only class that semester. In the SIG business meeting, Clandinin gave an unofficial talk (undocumented on AERA’s research repository) on an article she was writing that attacked the notion of outcome-based evaluation of teachers and programs, particularly, in this case, at a nursing school in Australia. This argument is one that I have seen several times; it seems to rest on the notion that evaluation of programs based on learning objectives / outcomes is flawed because objectives cause student experience to be stripped of nuance and context. If learning outcomes assessment is even the majority of program evaluation, the narrtivists argue, then students may fail to see their experiences as a whole; or, non-cognitive behaviors cultivated in the program that are valuable will go unnoticed or unexamined. For this reason, narrative inquirers are absolutely against objective-driven courses, programs, and evaluations off programs. In fact, a special issue of Qualitative Inquiry contains several essays decrying objective-driven learning in the wake off No Child Left Behind (Rosiek, 2007).
As a student of the humanities first and social sciences later, I can appreciate both sides of the argument. Like Clandinin and other narrative inquirers, I understand that academic plan may be best understood as a narrative because only through their experiences do we know if the academic plan coalesces as planned. However, I also understand the value utilizing learning objectives. Learning objectives allow faculty to communicate to students what is expected of those students; and they also allow faculty to communicate with each other across colleges and between universities about what specific courses are trying to help students achieve. I figured that there must be a way to bridge the divide between narrative inquiry and learning outcomes, and the rest of my degree program has been trying to figure a way to articulate that response.
VI — The Falling Action
As luck would have it, my decision to only take one course in spring 2016 worked out very well, as HI ED 840: Assessing Student Learning and Evaluating Academic Programs was completed for online delivery for summer 2016. HI ED 840 allowed me to engage in understanding of assessment of student learning and program evaluation within the higher education context, but also with the necessary scaffolding of directing me to the finest research on the topics. After moving from empirical-based assessment strategies in fall 2015 all the way to narrative-based understanding of student experiences in spring 2016, HI ED 840 provided me with the perfect blend of structure and exploration to dive deeper into the notion of how important learning objectives and the resultant student learning outcomes are to the design, delivery, and review of academic programs. I’m embarrassed to note that it wasn’t until HI ED 840 that I felt comfortable defining what exactly a learning objective it was and what its functions were. Learning objective to me has been another type of term that everybody uses and everybody thinks thinks they know what it means, but does not take the time to define it. HI ED 840 gave me the understanding from the best research on assessment of student learning in higher education to tackle the epistemological and methodological differences between objective-based understanding of academic plans and narrative understanding of academic plans.
VI — Resolution: The M. Ed. HI ED Capstone
The M. Ed. HI ED capstone experience has allowed me to catalog the journey I have taken in this program and understand how I embody the learning objectives of this program. Each course in this program has allowed me inch closer and closer to the learning objectives of this program, but I think the capstone experience facilitated me to make the most progress in academic writing. Narrative Inquiry in Post-Secondary Education Program Reviews, the academic paper I wrote for this course, embodies my achievement in nearly all of the learning objectives of this program. I identify a potential gap in the best practices for program reviews in higher education; I survey the literature to understand the conversations surrounding this dilemma; I present a contextually appropriate argument for an additional program review method to add to the repertoire; I examine the potential ethical complications surrounding the new method; and I note the opportunities for further examination into the topic — for others, should they choose to pick up the question, but, more importantly, for myself. I am passionate about the possibilities for narrative construction to enhance our understandings of academic plans and improve them over time, and I am passionate about investigating those possibilities when I am able to do so.
This realization has become the defining moment in my master’s program because it has allowed me to articulate a vision of curriculum within higher education that I believe is unique and holds value. Furthermore, it has ignited a passion in me to contribute something meaningful to the field of higher education. Even if this is something I never pursue in academic terms (as a D. Ed. or Ph.D.), it is something I will continue to explore professionally in the years to come.
References
Rosiek, J. (2007). Introduction to part 1: Horizons of narrative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(4), pp. 447-449.