Wendy Troxel, Director // NACADA Center for Research at Kansas State University

Welcome to the first issue of the NACADA Research newsletter! We’ll use this as an opportunity to provide information about the breadth and depth of scholarly inquiry related to academic advising. As the field of academic advising continues to strengthen, those involved have a unique perspective on student learning and maturity, with an increasing responsibility to both consume and contribute to the scholarly literature.

Active involvement in that arena encourages discussion, debate, and the exchange of ideas pertaining to academic advising through numerous professional development activities, publications, and collaborative modalities. The commitment to the scholarship that informs our work with students is a critical link to advance intentional pedagogy, context, theories, and outcomes of academic advising.

This research-focused newsletter will be published at least quarterly, and will feature a wide range of events, resources, and emerging issues. And we’ll highlight and celebrate important scholarly inquiry published by colleagues.

Please contact us at NACADA-RESEARCH@KSU.EDU with ideas and questions.

Welcome to the NACADA Community of Scholars! #nacadaresearch

The Need for Writing Groups
Rhonda Dean-Kyncl, NACADA Coordinator of Writer Support

The goal of the NACADA-wide Virtual Writing Groups is to provide the environment for writing communities to flourish. We know that practicing your work within a writing group will enhance your development as an advisor. Good writing follows good thinking. Good thinking depends on good writing. As you reflect on your work and develop ideas around it, you develop yourself as a professional. You begin to research and delve deeper into the concepts of our work, the theories that inform our practice, and the impacts on students.

You also begin to hear the work of others and integrate it into your practice. This communal and very synergistic process begins to make you a better and more engaged professional.

We are fostering Writing Groups to defy the “myth of genius.” While communities of practice in academic advising are nothing new, writing in a group IS new. Many believe that writing is a solitary activity, that “good” writers sit in attic rooms and bring forth page after page of perfect texts. If you believe in this myth, and yet you struggle to come up with an idea or to write a coherent page of text, you become frustrated and may eventually stop trying. The fact is that we ALL need a community of practice that supports and encourages us.

If our academic advising profession is important enough to do then it is important enough to write about, to think about, and to discuss with our colleagues and peers across campus, across the nation, across the world.

By joining one of NACADA’s writing groups you are seizing the opportunity to deepen your professional life. And watch for more writing support in this column next month as we look at Practicing Hospitality in Writing Groups.

Congratulations to these scholars in NACADA who have recently successfully defended their dissertations!

D’Oyley, Alicia – Bunker Hill Community College
D’Oyley, A. A. (2020). Leading transformative change: Redesigning Community College Advising Systems. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Regis College. 
Defended on April 28, 2020.

Defended on May 12, 2020

Knibbs, Locksley – Florida Gulf Coast University
Knibbs, L. (2020). Characteristics, attributes, and qualifications public institutions of higher education seek in presidential candidates. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Northwestern University. 
Defended on March 12, 2020

Congratulations to two of our scholars in NACADA who won the NACADA Student Research Award! The Student Research Awards annually recognize research conducted during a Master’s, Ed.D., or Ph.D. program that significantly adds to the body of knowledge on academic advising.

From the editorial teams of the NACADA Journal and the NACADA Review

Research is defined by NACADA as “scholarly inquiry into all aspects of the advising interaction, the role of advising in higher education, and the effects that advising can have on students” (NACADA Task Force on the Infusion of Research, 2008). This definition is intentionally broad. The intent is to invite engagement in scholarly inquiry by those who examine advising as well as those who practice advising. But research completed can have limited impact unless it is shared with others. Enter the NACADA Review: Academic Advising Praxis and Perspectives and the NACADA Journal.

The NACADA Review and the NACADA Journal are two forums through which research findings and implications are made public and added to the literature base of the field. The differences between these publication venues support NACADA’s interest in encouraging and supporting research in the broadest sense of the term. The NACADA Journal seeks to advance the field of academic advising by encouraging manuscript submissions that are based on institutional review board approval (all research in U.S. institutions involving human subjects requires such approval) and use qualitative, quantitative, or mixed research methodology, or are discussions of theory. The NACADA Review puts theory-based application on center stage. The dynamic relationship between theory and theory-based models, known as praxis, is the process that moves scholar-practitioners in advising from theory to practice, from reflective thought to action.

We encourage faculty members, graduate students, administrators, and advising practitioners to submit their scholarly inquiry as prospective authors for either the NACADA Journal or the NACADA Review. We invite prospective authors from diverse populations, disciplines, and fields of study to submit manuscripts, and we aim to be inclusive in every sense of the word—we envision a stimulating exchange of ideas from across the global community of academic advising.

At the end of the day, that is what research at its best can do: stimulate an exchange of ideas. And that can happen best if you publish. Your ideas, your scholarship, can only affect others in our field if they can access it. The two journals sponsored by NACADA allow you to do that, to close the loop and put forward your ideas in the great crucible of scholarship: publication.

Reference

NACADA Task Force on the Infusion of Research. (2008). Final Report from the Taskforce on Infusing Research Throughout NACADA Unpublished Report. Manhattan, KS: NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising.

Emily McIntosh, UKAT Research Committee

The Research Committee of UK Advising & Tutoring has been established for over four years and plays an important role in championing an evidence-based approach to advising and tutoring practice in the UK.  We are very proud of our global partnership with NACADA and have strong links with LVSA, the Dutch advising association.  Since the Research Committee was formed, we have supported a wide variety of advising and tutoring research projects and showcased research at the annual UKAT conference via the Research Café sessions.  Since 2016, we have held three Research Residentials, which are designed to support colleagues to plan their research projects and provide an outlet for writing.  A core pillar of the Research Residentials is to provide research mentoring for UKAT members where we match up mentors with mentees, depending on their research topic.  To-date we have mentored over 30 colleagues.  We have supported research into learning analytics, principles of advising & tutoring, effective advising and tutoring, professional development for advisors and tutors, and auditing institutional provision of advising and tutoring.  Research mentoring and updates have become a key feature of the work we do to support our growing membership in the UK, and beyond. As a result of the work we have done to champion a research culture within UK advising systems, we successfully negotiated a Special Edition of Frontiers in Education: Leadership in Education series which is due to be published in 2020. 

For more information about UKAT see: https://www.ukat.uk/