Volume 10, Issue 5

What is the purpose of undergraduate education? What should be taught or learned in college? Who should teach? Reflections on these three questions lead to recommendations for student affairs practitioners as they consider their roles in contributing to the education of students. The goals of a liberal education are congruent with the goals of student affairs. Student learning and engagement can be enriched when student affairs professionals collaborate with faculty to facilitate challenging encounters that empower students, liberate them, and cultivate their sense of social responsibility.

An emphasis on learning is emerging as the overarching paradigm and rationale for the work of student affairs. Promising possibilities will take student affairs involvement beyond a "movement," with unprecedented opportunities for professionals to contribute directly to student learning. These opportunities are evident when the definition of learning is expanded to include how student affairs collaborates with faculty while creating intentional learning outcomes for activities, programs, and experiences of students outside the classroom. As noted in Learning Reconsidered, contributing to overall student learning is an important and lasting role for student affairs. While there may be some who are philosophically opposed to student affairs professionals defining themselves as educators, the student learning "movement" has held strong for more than a decade and shows no signs of being replaced.

The Student Learning Imperative (1994) and Learning Reconsidered (2004) argue that learning and development are so intertwined that they can be integrated and unified into a single concept called learning. This article argues that (1) the two concepts are related but not the same, (2) development may be the more fundamental concept, not learning, and (3) the student learning paradigm is a refinement of and an improvement on the student development paradigm.

Learning partnerships between faculty and student affairs staff are prevalent in campuses across the country. In an effort to further examine these partnerships, the researchers conducted a bottomup audit of ten student affairs departments at one large public research university in the Southeast. From the findings, a conceptual framework with seven distinct categories was identified, including: learning compacts, research, consultation, advising, committees/task forces, shared use of facilities/resources, and informal contacts. A definition and specific examples of each are included in this report.