Putting Theory into Practice: Virginia Gordon at Ohio State

In Higgins and Campbell's article for this special edition of the NACADA Journal dedicated to Virginia N. Gordon, the authors discussed Gordon's leadership style, aligning it with that of servant leadership. Higgins and Campbell included many heartfelt quotes from individuals who were touched by Virginia's personal contact and leadership as they describe the honors and recognition she received throughout her years of professional service.

Less well known, though, is the dedicated and transformative work she engaged in for most of her professional life at Ohio State University. The history of how Gordon created the advising programs for undecided and major-changing students has only been partially told (Gordon, 1981; Gordon & Steele, 1992, 2015). To rectify this, this article will address how her ideas and convictions about academic advising became the blueprint for how she created two advising programs at Ohio State's University College from the mid-1970s to her retirement in the mid-1990s. In this effort, Gordon demonstrated her skilled command of the educational process, focusing on curricular development, instructional design, and critical learning to help students with their educational and career planning. Through this process, Gordon also demonstrated a creative and experimental temperament and ability to adjust and adapt to ever-changing organizational structures and evolving technologies. The goal of this article is to describe how Gordon addressed educational and administrative challenges in her context so that the work she did with colleagues external to Ohio State would be better understood and more deeply appreciated.

Gordon's Foundational Beliefs

In describing Gordon's impact and accomplishments at Ohio State, it is necessary first to ascertain what she sought to achieve and the challenges she encountered in implementing the two advising programs. This overview of some of Gordon's foundational beliefs will describe how her graduate work and life-long commitment to developmental advising shaped her efforts. To wit, when she became program coordinator in 1973, Gordon used these foundational beliefs as a framework to design and build the undecided program at Ohio State.

Theory into Practice at University College

Gordon was working at Ohio State University while she was completing her graduate work. She acknowledged that she was fortunate to begin her work at an institution that valued academic advising and sought innovative ways to improve “advising structures and procedures [to]…meet increasing enrollments and expanding student-advising needs” (Gordon, 2004, p. 17). The creation of University College in 1966 was the institution's most recent attempt to address what had been called for over 50 years the “freshman problem” or issues related to student academic preparedness and vocational awareness (Gordon, 2004). Minnick (1993) identified the mission of University College as to “advise lower division students on curricular matters, to support them in their initial year or two of enrollment, and to hand them off to a degree-granting unit once they had settled on a thoughtful, workable choice” (p. 58). Gordon was fortunate to be in an organizational structure that recognized that most first-year students were not decided about their academic and vocational choices and that it was better to centralize advising services rather than to disperse students upon entry to degree-granting colleges.

Organizationally, University College's advising programs were arranged into curricular academic program (CAP) areas. Eighteen of these CAP areas were aligned with degree-granting colleges at Ohio State and acted as pre-major advising programs. Students in these CAP areas were assigned a pre-major advisor and would work with that advisor until they completed the transfer requirements or were admitted to a degree-granting college by application acceptance or a portfolio review. Two CAP areas that were not aligned with degree-granting colleges were the CAP area for undecided or exploring students and a program designed to assist minority students. Gordon became the coordinator of advising for the undecided program in 1973, nine years after University College was started.

The Alternatives Advising Program

Gordon was also the driving force behind the creation of a special advising unit at University College at Ohio State in the late 1980s. It was intended to provide “a more personal and intensive advising to students with advanced credit hours who were in the process of changing academic and vocation direction” (Gordon & Steele, 1992, pp. 22–23). The goals of the program were a) to provide to this student population an intensive academic and career advising approach that provided a personalized, caring environment during their transition and b) to help them choose realistic and attainable majors that demonstrated stability of choice over time, supported with services designed for these students with the goal of enhancing their college success and institutional retention.

Gordon developed the Alternatives Advising Program due in part to the pressures advisors in the undecided program faced in trying to help this population. Generally, the alternative advising program was intended for students at University College at the mid-point of their sophomore year or later who a) were denied admission to a selective admission program, b) were unsuccessful in completing the required coursework for a specific program, c) had reached junior status, or d) were still undecided about their academic or vocational direction. Initially, referrals to the alternatives program relied on advisor referrals from the undecided advising program and pre-major programs within University College. By the mid-1990s though, potential students for referral were identified using the institution's data warehouse to prepare lists of possible students. Advisors in the pre-major program and undecided advising area were asked to approve the transfer if, in the advisor's judgment, the student would benefit from working with an alternatives program advisor.

The Alternatives Advising Program used three modified modes of delivery, as compared to the undecided program. The program relied on a longer advising time for individual sessions, a 3-hour credit course designed to help these students establish their academic and vocational direction, and the use of group advising workshops organized around a variety of different topics. The advising curriculum for this special population was also modified. Before engaging in self-assessment, students went through a “taking stock” module. This step emphasized the importance of decision making and the reexamination of prior decisions. In the workbook they designed for the course, Gordon and Sears (1997b) defined the purpose of this curricular module as to have students “take stock of your current situation and examine how it has resulted from decisions you have made about your academic major and career” (p. 1). During its dozen or so years of existence, the Alternatives Advising Program grew from initially having one and a half advisors staff the program to having two full-time advisors and three to four part-time graduate students advising students during the late 1990s.

The program was also assessed. One published account was a longitudinal study conducted by Steele, Kennedy, and Gordon in 1993. In this study, the authors reported that the students who exited the program had a higher consistency in maintaining the major they selected while in the program through to their graduation compared to a cohort and a randomly selected group of students who shared characteristics with students who were referred to the alternatives program. They also graduated at a higher rate than the other two groups of students. Gordon's conviction that academic advising could help this special population was confirmed.

Developing Resources and Activities

Gordon not only created workbooks to help guide students through the decision-making process for both the undecided and alternatives programs but also supplemented these with other resources she designed or introduced. Three examples are resources for informational interviewing, re-structured career resources in the library, and computer-based career advising systems.

Gordon created two resources for informational interviewing. She recruited graduating seniors every year from degree-granting colleges at Ohio State who were willing to talk with underclass students about their major, career direction, and decision-making process. This resource was named Senior Bank. She also recruited a group of Ohio State alumni who were willing to be interviewed by underclass students about issues related to their major, career direction, and decision-making process. This resource was called Partners in Education. In addition to recruiting these individuals, Gordon also created resources that discussed the importance of informational interviews and gave suggestions on how to conduct one. Individuals who participated in these programs provided a valuable human resource for exploring students.

At the time, the Ohio State University library system had many sites. In the pre-Internet age, all career resources on campus were printed and distributed through the library system. Working with the library staff, Gordon centralized all career resources into one location and had them reorganized, dropping the Dewey Decimal System traditionally used by the library in favor of the Worker Trait Group System—a means of categorizing careers developed by the U.S. Department of Labor. After changing the method used to categorize the career resources, students were able to more easily access resources related to the self-assessment information they obtained using the inventories as a guide.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, two computer-based career advising systems were adopted as additional resources for students to use in their exploration and planning. The two systems were Discover, a product of American College Testing programmed to focus on the importance of student interests, and Sigi Plus, a product of the Educational Testing Service, which was programmed to focus on the student's ranking of the importance of career values.

In 1997, the Undecided Advising Program and Alternatives Advising Program at Ohio State were recognized by NACADA. Both were awarded the Outstanding Advising Program Award. In the role of consultant, Gordon, who was then an assistant dean at University College, worked with several of her mentees who were promoted to administer both programs. This team used Gordon's curriculum and resources as a basis for building a web site for students to explore. By embracing the Internet, the need lessened for printed resources, such as the career library, and they were eventually phased out.

Activities and Evidence of Student Learning

Overlooked, yet important in Gordon's work, was her role in creating activities that produced evidence of student learning. As stated, Gordon established general learning goals at the curricular level, but she also established learning outcomes at the instructional level that focused on helping students achieve broader curricular learning goals. The instructional learning goals had activities associated with them that had students engage in various forms of critical thinking as it related to their planning. Examples of these instructional goals are reflected in the previously mentioned synopsis of items students had to address in their worksheet summaries. These instructional-level learning outcomes focused on having students explore their unexamined beliefs and reflect on the information they acquired as they developed their plans. At this instructional level of advising, Gordon produced some of the most creative but overlooked content in the field of academic advising. As Gordon developed her approach, more mature versions of it appeared in the workbooks she created for working with undecided and major-changing students (Gordon & Sears, 1995, 1997a, 1997b; Gordon & Steele, 1998). The use of these activities helped advisors rise above their reliance on using probing and higher-order questions to engage students in a conversation during the advising session. In this way, Gordon's use of learning outcomes at both the curricular and instructional levels helped students with their creative efforts to develop their academic and career plans. Equally important, Gordon's approach had students provide tangible evidence of their learning. While Gordon's work focused predominately on undecided students, she believed that all students would benefit from developing educational and career plans in this fashion.

Discussion

Gordon's design and development of advising programs for undecided and major-changing students at Ohio State benefited from the historical attention the institution gave to academic advising and its desire to improve its quality over many decades in the previous century. Into this supportive environment, Gordon brought her commitment to grounding the advising programs she administered within a developmental student-centric approach that focused on both teaching and learning. Many critical ideas formed the basis of her approach: a) that both students and advisors shared a responsibility in the advising relationship, b) that an increase in the time that advisors and advisees spent together improved the quality of the relationship, c) that the central focus of the advising relationship was the creation of students' academic and career plans, and d) that the development of students' plans needed to occur in a resource-rich environment in which advisors provided an intentional framework to help students develop their critical thinking skills. In short, Gordon advocated for a balance between teaching and learning in advising that shaped the way she developed her approach at both the programmatic and advisor/advisee interaction levels.

Gordon anticipated many of the foundational educational ideas developed later in the documents that comprise NACADA's Pillars of Academic Advising. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the advising program she developed at Ohio State clearly had an identifiable academic advising curriculum with learning outcomes directly associated with that curriculum and an intentional focus on using critical or reflective thinking as a pedagogical approach when working with students.

While many of Gordon's ideas and practices have influenced the academic advising community, her insistence on balancing teaching and learning did not get as much recognition. One is left to speculate: What if Gordon, or those who knew her work the best, had more forcefully promoted and advanced the balance between teaching and learning? Perhaps the overemphasis since the turn of this century on what an advisor does instead of what students learn would have been better balanced in the advising literature. In discussions on advising as teaching (Hemwall & Trachte, 2005; Lowenstein, 2009) and, more generally, on advising approaches (Drake, Jordan, & Miller, 2013), the predominant focus is on what advisors do, not on what students need to learn.

Gordon's embrace of and advocacy for intentionally adopting multiple approaches to engaging students in critical or reflective thinking would have complemented all of these efforts. The editors of the book Academic Advising Approaches: Strategies that Teach Students to Make the Most of College shared this position. The editors of this book challenged their readers to “use the theories, approaches, and strategies in this book to influence advising practice and help students better meet their academic goal and career aspirations” (Drake et al., 2013, p. xiv). By testing “theories, approaches, and strategies” against the evidence of student-learning outcomes, advisors can improve their practice, as opposed to embracing one theory, approach, or strategy based solely on its transitory appeal. Adopting a singular approach to advising is not embracing critical thinking as a pedagogical approach; instead, it is adopting an ideology. Again, Gordon provided a means of operationalizing this stance decades ago. While broad learning goals can be reorganized as topics in an “advising curriculum,” Gordon's approach also included the use of learning outcomes associated with activities that we might consider operational at an instructional level; these drove formative evaluations of students' progress. It is at this instructional level of advising that Gordon produced some of the most creative and overlooked content in the field of academic advising.

Gordon's balancing of teaching and learning would have also assisted scholars in writing on the assessment of academic advising. These authors have long noted the importance of the use of student-learning outcomes in program assessment (Campbell, 2008; Robbins, 2009a, 2009b; Robbins & Zarges, 2011; Troxel, 2008; Zarges, Adams, Higgins, & Muhovich, 2018). The ideal evidence of student learning is the direct evidence of learning they produce as learning outcomes. If advising is an intentional activity, this is essential. Historically, this evidence has been difficult to acquire because of the reliance on verbal communication forming the predominant basis of the interactions of advisors and advisees. It has been further thwarted by the reliance on advisors' notes to describe the advising interaction with the student. Using Gordon's approach, when students are engaged in activities, they need to respond in writing, and such evidence is produced. Perhaps with the adoption of learning technologies in the field of academic advising, the process of capturing and using this evidence of student learning might not be quite as difficult in the future. This author has suggested that technologies, such as learning management systems and e-portfolios, could help structure the advising process by having advisors organize their advising curricula with these tools while using the evaluation tools to encourage student critical thinking and acquire evidence of student learning (Steele, 2015, 2016, 2018). The adoption of such a process would provide a digital solution to the paper-based approach Gordon developed over 40 years ago.

Mark Twain is purported to have said, “History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The advising program that Virginia N. Gordon created in the late 1970s through the 1990s anticipated many of the essential ideas articulated over two decades later in the NACADA's Pillars of Academic Advising documents. That is not to say that Gordon was the originator of these ideas. Instead, as this article showed, these ideas have had a much longer history. Gordon's work shows how one creative and profoundly committed woman, who was dedicated to the cause of helping college students through a critical transitional period in their lives, masterfully applied a teaching and learning approach to an advising program, and having done so, created a foundation that those in the field of advising can build upon in their own time.