Developmentally effective experiences in a graduate business school and their role in self-authorship among students

Abstract

Holistic student development is an important objective of higher education. It requires students to move from a conventional assumptions-based mode of understanding to a critical, systemic thinking that enables the development of an ability to accommodate multiple perspectives and discern among them. Self-authorship theory, derived from the constructivist developmental tradition of student development, suggests that holistic student development is achieved when students gain cognitive maturity, develop an integrated identity and achieve relational maturity. It is a journey from relying on external sources of meaning making to relying primarily on internally generated meaning making. This journey is facilitated by many ‘developmentally effective experiences’ (DEEs) that are part of the lives of young adults in their twenties as they undergo higher education. They include values exploration, making sense of past personal experience, relationships with others, and decisions about the future and thinking about how to get there. Like the individuals who experience them, DEEs are embedded in the campus environment and must be studied within their context. This study examines DEEs in the context of a graduate school of business in India and their role in the development of self-authorship among students. The study is located in the interpretivist tradition of qualitative research and uses symbolic interactionism as an analytical perspective. The data are drawn from semi-structured interviews with selected alumni of the business school. The study describes the meaning-making roles that allowed students to develop a strong internal voice which was an essential part of their developmental journey. The DEEs identified and the associated meaning-making roles are an integral part of the socialization on campus. The core elements and processes of socialization are an important part of student self-authorship development. The elements of the context that support the students as they experience DEEs are also examined. This study contributes to the growing literature on self-authorship development in new cultural contexts, and in graduate professional education. It supports the argument for designing developmentally effective socialization experiences as part of the larger quest for holistic development of students in higher education.