Letter to the Coeditors: Toward an Architectonic in Academic Advising: Scholarly Inquiry in Academic Advising (2^nd Edition)

We are pleased to announce the arrival of the second edition of Scholarly Inquiry in Academic Advising. The first edition of Scholarly Inquiry in Academic Advising (Hagen et al., 2010) was a breakthrough, a radical shift in thinking about academic advising research because it sought to go beyond traditional social science inquiry to include modes of research from the humanities. Even the title—“scholarly inquiry” instead of “research”—broke new ground by shifting from the epistemological connotations of research to a more encompassing set of connotations of scholarly inquiry.

New schools of thought have emerged and gathered adherents in the intervening years. Among these have been movements like appreciative advising (He et al., 2020) and narrative advising (Hagen, 2018). New interest-based communities, such as the LGBTQ advising community, have emerged within NACADA and are creating their own research agendas (McGill & Joslin, 2021). Two international advising organizations—UKAT (United Kingdom Advising and Tutoring) and LVSA (Landelijke Vereniging van Studieadviseurs)—have become affiliated with NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising. There are now four juried journals in the field of academic advising. NACADA has also developed a robust book publication program. Further, the establishment of the NACADA Research Center at Kansas State University is dedicated to “research in academic advising and student success and serves as a resource for advancing the scholarly practice and applied research related to academic advising” (para. 1). Lastly, but perhaps most significant of all, has been the creation of a Ph.D. program in Leadership in Academic Advising at Kansas State University. The time has come for a new, major statement on scholarly inquiry—research—in academic advising, one that draws from the ways the field has changed since the first edition in 2010 and will foster the growth of new ways of knowing.

In this new edition, we have sought to provide scholar-practitioners with methodological perspectives from each major way of knowing: the social sciences, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches; the arts; the humanities; and the natural sciences. We regard it as valuable to include this wide array for two main reasons:

• The full range of knowledge claims that can be made about academic advising no longer reside mostly in the realms of the social sciences (i.e., post-positivism) as they were ten years ago.

• While the number of graduate programs in academic advising has grown, it is still the case that scholar-practitioners come to the field of academic advising from diverse academic and professional backgrounds. They have typically received their primary exposure to research methodology in the discipline they studied.

To encompass all of the recent developments since 2010—and to prepare for developments to come—we have put forward in this volume an architectonic of research in academic advising. Scholarly Inquiry in Academic Advising (2^nd ed.) is no mere user's manual for those who wish to conduct research in academic advising. It is such a manual but is so much more. We have structured it so that it might, in turn, provide structure to explore what can be known about academic advising. It is a compendium of the structure of academic advising knowledge, the different types of knowledge about academic advising, and an explanation of how those types interrelate.

We scholar-practitioners tend to see things in ways already familiar to us. For example, a scholar-practitioner who cut their eye teeth in a graduate program that valorized quantitative inquiry methods may feel more at home conducting studies utilizing numerical information to answer questions about academic advising. We believe this book can support such a scholar. Likewise, for qualitative methods: those whose research home turf is more along qualitative lines will find much herein to foster their research. It is clear that, far from being inimical to each other, qualitative and quantitative methods can and often do support each other in scholarly inquiry. Known as “mixed methods,” this might best be considered a consilience, a confluence of the two major modalities of thought that draws its strength from the strengths of both of the main streams of research based in the social sciences.

But the structure of what can be known about academic advising is wider than that. Scholar-practitioners who come to advising scholarship from the arts, the humanities, or the natural sciences will also find ways to draw upon their scholarly backgrounds to investigate academic advising and find those research modalities fostered in this volume. It may be most useful to see this architectonic in terms of the word buried within this less familiar word: “arch.” We regard all of the research modalities presented in Scholarly Inquiry in Academic Advising as connected and interdependent, just as with stones in an arch. The various stones may seem independent, yet the arch crumbles without even the least among them. We believe knowledge about academic advising can and should be sought through all of the modalities in this arch: social science, humanities, science, and the arts. With all of these stones, the arch will hold; the architectonic will be useful.

In this second edition of Scholarly Inquiry in Academic Advising, we have designed a vade mecum (i.e., handbook) for researchers in academic advising. Through the tremendous contributions of our authors, we endeavor to help researcher-practitioners formulate research questions, structure their research, point to useful theoretical and methodological approaches, guide analysis, and help find publication outlets. Thus, we sought to raise the level of discourse about academic advising, illustrate its history, reflect on how research can foster new perspectives, and connect with and foster social justice, internationality, and inclusivity. We intended to create a work that can inspire incipient researchers to see what is possible and expand the horizons of even the most seasoned researchers. As it has turned out, it is more than a vade mecum; it is architectonic.

While this volume is not intended to push back the frontiers of knowledge, it is intended to assist those who do because it will serve as a handbook for advising scholars, whatever their epistemological, theoretical, axiological, and methodological predilections. As for practitioners, we feel that this book would raise the bar and convey the notion to even non-researching practitioners that scholarly inquiry in academic advising is a desirable avenue to professional development and must inform their practice.

We have organized this book into three broad sections. Many chapters have related auxiliary articles with a more practical focus, called “Inquiry in Practice.”