Self-Authorship: Advancing Students' Intellectual Growth

Peggy S. Meszaros (Ed.). Self-Authorship: Advancing Students' Intellectual Growth. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 109. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. 88 pp. Paper: $29.00. ISBN: 13-978-0787-9972-12.

The student outcomes that higher education strives to achieve are ambitious: critical thinking, an appreciation for multiple perspectives, and civic engagement, to name but a few. Increasingly, however, institutions are combatting an onslaught of criticism about levels of student learning. Demands to demonstrate student outcomes have resulted in a troubling trend: a narrow focus on knowledge acquisition as measured by standardized tests of skills.

In Self-Authorship: Advancing Students' Intellectual Growth, Peggy Mezsaros argues that the goals of the academy "go considerably beyond mere knowledge of subject matter and require a new lens to view learning and teaching in higher education" (p. 5). This monograph provides that lens and is, in effect, a guidebook for institutions seeking to transform themselves and put student learning at the center of their endeavors.

Such transformations must be grounded in theories of intellectual development. In this case, self-authorship (Keegan, 1994, Baxter Magolda, 1999) serves as the theoretical scaffolding. Selfauthorship describes the developmental journey that students take as their beliefs about knowledge (epistemology), their relationships with others (interpersonal), and their own identities (intrapersonal) change over time. Development occurs as they move from assuming that knowledge is absolute and relying on others for validation to accepting that knowledge is socially constructed and integrating others' opinions with their own internal voice.

Meszaros opens the volume by arguing that self-authorship can serve as the catalyst for institutional transformation. She begins by defining intellectual development,...