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Three different uses of the term student development-humanism, complexity, and developmental stage theory-are reviewed. The latter is thought to be the most fruitful for the use of student personnel work. Two examples of the use of stage or hierarchal developmental theory for making changes in student personnel structures are described.
In recent years the field of student personnel work has been in search of new moorings. The field has never had a clear identity, and the student protest movement of the 60s intensified the feelings of identity diffusion amongst those on campus responsible for student welfare. One solution to the diffusion has been student development. To date, however, there have been very few attempts to translate the construct into operational structures or programs. Part of the difficulty has come from the rather vague, nonspecific meanings attached to the term; another part has come from the inertia involved in changing organizations and institutions. In this article we will examine student development as a psychological construct and then illustrate the use of the construct in shaping the programs of two different institutions.
STUDENT DEVELOPMENT AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSTRUCT
Development as the new humanism. Some writers equate student development with providing a rich environment productive of growth. There are no clear indications of what should result from such growth, but terms such as self-fulfillment, selfactualization and self-realization are used. The programmatic implications of such terms are unclear. An example of such a position is O'Bannion and Thurstone's (1972) recent book on student development in the community college. They did not define student development per se, but they did describe the student development worker on the one hand and a student development course on the other, as follows: One way of describing the model that needs to be developed is to present an idealized prototype of the student personnel worker as a person.... [a] person who is needed bas been described by Maslow, as selfactualizing, by Horney as self-realizing, by Privette as transcendent-functioning and by Rogers as fully-functioning. Other humanistic psychologists described such healthy personalities as open to experience, democratic, accepting, Understanding, caring, supporting, approving, loving, and nonjudgmental. . . . They believe that every, student is a gifted person, that every student has untapped potentialities, that every...