The Activity of Meaning Making: A Holistic Perspective on College Student Development

The student affairs profession embraced student development theory as its guid­ ing philosophy in the 1970s, a move arti cu lated explicitly in Brown’s (1972) Student Development in Tomorrow’s Higher Education—A Return to the Academy. Brown reiterated student affairs’ commitment to the whole student, a commitment outlined as early as 1937 in the Student Personnel Point of View (National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, 1989), and argued for collaboration among student affairs and faculty to promote students’ development. Although the profession adopted student development theory as a philosophy to augment its whole student stance, theorists focused on separate strands of theory that complicated emphasizing the whole student. Knefelkamp, Widick, and Parker (1978) synthesized the student development research literature into five clusters, noting that they “did not find, nor could we create, the comprehensive model of student development” (p. xi). The five clusters—psychosocial theo­ ries, cognitive developmental theories, matur ity models, typology models, and person–environment interaction models—have remained as separate lines of theorizing through much of the student development literature. Although Knefelkamp and her colleagues portrayed all five clusters as valuable, research tended to further each cluster with insufficient attention to their intersections. Research in the psychological tradition tended to focus on the person; research in the sociological tradition focused on the environment. Literature on student success, outcomes, and learning is often separated from literature on student development. To complicate matters further, research within clusters to create theory in the context of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation typically resulted in separate silos rather than interconnected possibilities. Although the student affairs profession moved to explicitly embrace the link between development and learning with the Student Learning Imperative (American College Personnel Association, 1994) and Learning Reconsidered (Keeling, 2004), the learning and student development literatures are rarely integrated (Wildman & Baxter Magolda, 2008). Thus, higher education in general and student affairs in particular lack a holistic, theoretical perspective to promote the learning and development of the whole student. Constructing a holistic theoretical perspec­ tive requires focusing on intersections rather than separate constructs. Robert Kegan, a pioneer in moving toward a holistic theoretical perspective, advocated “moving from the dichotomous choice to the dialectical context which brings the poles into being in the first place” (1982, p. ix, italics in original). He argued that the questions