Intellectual Humility, Honors, and Appreciative Advising: Exploring with Students that Changing Their Mind Does Not End the World

Authors

Alan Sells, Ohio State UniversityFollow

Date of this Version

2023

Document Type

Book Chapter

Citation

Chapter 5, pages 93-101

In: Advising for Today's Honors Students, Erin E. Edgington, editor

National Collegiate Honors Council, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States, 2023

Comments

Copy right 2023, National Collegiate Honors Council. Used by permission

Abstract

Section headings:

Honors and the foreclosure student

Major changing and intellectual humility

Intellectual humility and appreciative advising

Conclusion and final thoughts

Honors students who change majors often find themselves faced with an identity crisis. Our job as advisors is to support these students by guiding them through this difficult transition. It is easy to look at these students and to regard them as having all of their plans in order and to believe they do not need extra attention (Robinson, 1997). Nothing could be further from the truth. Honors students are, in many ways, like any other student, and they should be given the same amount of care and attention as their non-honors peers. Treating the identity crisis that students are undergoing as a true crisis and being empathetic with the students as they work through walking away from an older, underdeveloped identity and forging a new one are of vital importance.

By combining appreciative advising, intellectual humility, and mindfulness, advisors can help honors students who are foreclosed in their identities move toward identity achievement, which is defined by Marcia (1966) as having “experienced a crisis period and [becoming] committed to an occupation and ideology” (p. 551). Using the appreciative advising framework, advisors can help break down the walls that students have built to protect their identity, and in so doing, expose the identity as fraudulent. They can then revisit the stages of appreciative advising, allowing students more time to reflect on who they are and what they want, as opposed to what someone else wants for them. Then, working within the concepts of intellectual humility and mindfulness, advisors can help students move past the fraudulent identity and confront the gaps in their own knowledge of themselves while reminding them that it is perfectly fine to not know things and that it is also normal for them to change their mind. This reassurance allows students to begin to synthesize a new identity and to be much more comfortable in their decisions regarding the future.