Rachael Vines, Syracuse University Laura DeJoseph McArdle, Syracuse University College is a time when students are exposed to a variety of disciplines and experiences that will help shape their perspective of themselves and the world around them. Everyone has stories they create to make sense of the world, and there are inevitably times when the story takes an unexpected turn. As advisors help students navigate difficult situations, from changing their major to academic suspension, advisors encounter student stories where their intended plan may no longer be an option. As a means for advisors to help students navigate situations where they encounter a narrative of failure, advisors can implement a five-step framework for deconstructing failure. These steps were formed through borrowing concepts from counseling techniques, academic advising, and NACADA’s relational competencies (2017). The framework provides advisors with an actionable outline of how to successfully navigate these difficult conversations to help students find and embrace a new path forward through their own stories of failure.
Deconstructing Narratives of Failure Through Academic Advising
The stories people have about themselves are powerful and often drive behavior. What are the stories students create about themselves? What do they tell themselves during times of failure? What do they tell themselves about their potential? To help students navigate possibilities during difficult circumstances, advisors can help students identify their own narrative and reframe a narrative of failure to one with a positive self-concept. This can be done through applying the five-step framework for deconstructing student failure narratives outlined below.
College Student Narratives of Failure
To support students through failure, or circumstances perceived as such, an understanding of the failure must be established. Many students come to college with hopes, dreams, and ambitions. In pursuit of these ambitions, students may encounter unexpected roadblocks, disrupting the path to their intended goal. Unplanned or undesired disruptions may lead to feelings of disappointment about the situation, or about themselves. A sense of failure may be present if a student believes an outcome is based on their own inadequacy, such as a lack of ability or intelligence, leading to the future they had envisioned no longer being possible.
Academic advisors encounter student failure narratives in a variety of contexts. Some include helping students navigate major choice and declaration, particularly if students do not meet necessary pre-requisite or GPA requirements. Career, job, and internship searches can be challenging, leaving students feeling inadequate. Applying to competitive graduate programs, including medical school or law school, may also lead a student to the general belief that they are not good enough. Difficult outcomes like taking a temporary leave from college, or landing on academic probation, can all lead college students to internalizing feelings of failure.
Guiding Concepts for Deconstructing Failure
There are many concepts that the profession of advising borrows from psychology and counseling. Learning how to apply concepts from these fields can help shape the relational aspect within academic advising interactions. While distinctly different from mental health counseling, academic advisors can help students learn how to navigate larger patterns, problems, and themes they experience in their life and academics. Academic advisors must also recognize the boundaries and ethics of their profession and not overstep their role as academic advisors into the realm of therapy or mental health counseling. It is the relational and conversational techniques from psychology and counseling that have utility in academic advising. For example, use of motivational interviewing, a concept from clinical psychology, provides helpful techniques for academic advising interactions (Pettay, 2009).
Narrative Therapy
Concepts within the five-step framework for deconstructing failure narratives stem from narrative therapy, narrative advising, and the relational components of the NACADA Core Competencies (2017). Narrative therapy (White, 2006) specifically outlines the concept of reframing, which is an approach advisors can learn from and apply to their advising practice. Narrative therapy uses the techniques of 1) putting together the narrative, 2) externalizing the problem, 3) deconstruction, and 4) unique outcomes. Using these tools, advisors can talk with students about the stories they tell themselves around a problematic topic or challenging situation. By engaging with these stories, advisors can help students take new ownership and rewrite their own story. These concepts, coupled with more traditional techniques from academic advising, create the foundation of this deconstructing failure framework.
Academic Advising
The term and concept of ‘narrative has also been explored within the realm of academic advising. In The Power of Story: Narrative Theory in Academic Advising, Hagen (2018) explores elements of narrative, grounded in the humanities, including context, plot, style, and theme (p. 23). Another central model for interpersonal interactions between advisors and students in academic advising is the NACADA Academic Advising Core Competencies Model: Relational Component (2017). Key relational competencies central to this framework include “creating rapport and build academic advising relationships,” and “facilitating problem solving, decision-making, meaning-making, planning, and goal setting” (2017, Relational section, para. 1). Through the steps in the framework outlined below, advisors can develop techniques for fostering positive relationships and aide students as they work through a variety of challenges.
Five-Step Deconstructing Failure Framework
To effectively guide students through experiences of grappling with failure or perceived failure, academic advisors can apply the following five-step framework: 1) develop rapport, 2) name and validate the difficulty, 3) externalize the problem, 4) positively reframe, and 5) facilitate self-empowerment. In successfully navigating these steps, advisors can help students through difficult situations, identifying alternatives as well as action steps in their new path.
Step 1: Develop Rapport
Rapport is necessary when entering a student’s story. To build rapport, advisors apply a variety of techniques including asking questions to better understand the student’s motivations, goals, and interests. By getting to know students, advisors foster trust and demonstrate interest in their students. Cultivating rapport helps advisors identify intrinsic motivators, better empathize with a student’s perceived failure, and identify alternative paths, particularly if their previous path may no longer be possible.
While establishing a positive relationship, trust and rapport are important. It is also important for advisors to recognize their positionality both culturally and as a representative of their institution. While advisors are a space for support, they can also be seen as authority figures, or a symbol of the institution, responsible for academic decisions. For that reason, students may see advisors as hindering their goal. It is also possible that students may avoid processing perceived failure with advisors due to their position or the delicate nature of such discussions.
Step 2: Name and Validate the Difficulty
Through reflective listening, advisors can uncover the key issues to better understand and identify a problem from the student’s perspective. Part of validating the identified difficulty is leaving space for feelings such as sadness and frustration. This may involve leaving quiet space and pauses to allow for processing. Using reflective statements like “It sounds like . . . ” or validating feelings through statements like “This is very difficult” can affirm the disappointment faced. Demonstrate that it is okay to sit with disappointment. Advisors may be one of the few people students can speak with honestly. Through naming academic or personal realities or barriers, students clarify what troubles them most about the difficulty, including assumptions they make or ways they may couple the failure with their identity.
Step 3: Externalizing the Problem
Perceived failures or problems may be internalized and become intertwined with the way students see themselves. Internalizing is when a student conflates themselves as personally tied to the failure. One example of internalizing is when a student on academic probation claims, “I am on academic probation so I am (a failure).” Recognition of internalizing the problem may help students decouple failure from their identity. The student is not a failure. The student is experiencing a difficult situation. This technique, called externalizing, acknowledges the issue but recognizes that the issue is not intertwined with the student’s identity.
Step 4: Positive Reframing
Following the above steps, advisors have the opportunity to do what they do best—positive reframing and exploring alternatives. Recognizing assumptions and language used by students helps advisors begin to positively reframe the student’s narrative. Acknowledging and countering harmful self-talk, advisors can validate successes and offer new language to discuss the situation. This new language does not invalidate the student's story, as students know their experiences best, but offers a different perspective. Positive reframing can be an appropriate technique for presenting alternate paths to the student’s primary goal. While advisors are helpful at strategizing alternatives, resistance is expected if students are still processing disappointment. Setting a follow-up meeting to discuss alternatives may be an appropriate step in this case.
Step 5: Facilitating Self-Empowerment
While advisors offer many resources and ideas, part of facilitating self-empowerment is recognizing that students name their next steps. Advisors can clarify what it means to take an alternative path, as well as offer timelines, action items, or tasks that students may need to accomplish. While many logistics may be attached to a next step, a realistic action item may simply be offering to meet again when the student is ready. Allowing students to determine how to move forward is not a failure on the part of the advisor. Advisors do not always see the resolution of a student’s challenging situation. A student’s ultimate success is defined by them, and advisors may be one small part of their ultimate higher education story.
Conclusion
By applying the five-step deconstructing failure framework, advisors can implement strategies, influenced by counseling and academic advising concepts, to support their students navigating difficult roadblocks in their college experience. Whether supporting a student in academic recovery, pivoting to a new major, or discussing post-graduation plans, advisors can use their skills and competencies to recognize when students are up against a perceived failure. By developing rapport, naming and validating difficulty, externalizing the problem, positive reframing, and facilitating self-empowerment, advisors can be a steady, supportive hand through student challenges.
References
Hagen, P. L. (2018). The power of story: Narrative theory in academic advising (J. Givans Voller, Ed.). NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising.
NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising. (2017). NACADA academic advising core competencies model. https://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Resources/Pillars/CoreCompetencies.aspx
Pettay, R. F. (2009, June 1). Motivational interviewing in advising: Working with students to change. Academic Advising Today, 32(2). http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/Resources/Academic-Advising-Today/View-Articles/Motivational-Interviewing-in-Advising-Working-with-Students-to-Change.aspx
White M., & Morgan A. (2006). Narrative therapy with children and their families. Dulwich Centre Publications.
