The Advisor Book Club provides IUB advisors with a space to select, read and discuss books of professional interest to them. We select one book per semester and meet once during that semester to discuss the book. The interests of the group drive our book selections; our discussions are intended to challenge our thinking and evoke critical questions that will help to evolve our work as advisors. All IUB academic advisors are welcome in this group and are invited to participate! To get involved, please contact Emily McCord at eimccord@indiana.edu.
To date, the Advisor Book Club has read two titles: Armstrong & Hamilton's Paying for the Party and Verschelden's Bandwidth Recovery. At the bottom of this page, you can see the key, critical questions that emerged from reading and discussing these books.
In the spring of 2020, our book selection was Light's Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds. Through reading this text, we hoped to explore the following key questions:
- How do we (advisors) empower all students to take what they need or want from IUB to achieve their own vision of success?
- How do we challenge all students to grow academically and personally, in their time at IUB?
Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, we were unable to meet in spring 2020.
Other books that the Book Club has considered (and that may become future selections) are:
- Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz
- Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
- The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students by Anthony Abraham Jack
- Hand To Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado
- Ebony and Ivory: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder
Critical Questions Generated by the Advisor Book Club-
From Paying for the Party:
- Once diverse groups of students are admitted to IUB, how do we (as advisors) support them in defining and achieving success for themselves? Are there strategies that we could use that we are not yet using? What are they and how could they be put into motion?
- How do we empower students to take what they need or want from IUB to achieve their vision of success?
- How do we connect students, early on, to resources that often seem hidden or inaccessible? What resources open doors for students that otherwise would be closed and how do we effectively connect them to these?
- For students who do not have parents with the social capital to provide guidance in navigating life and education at IUB, how can we provide some of this guidance?
- How do we identify and support students who come to IUB with an “insecure academic orientation” (i.e. they don’t feel strongly about what they want to study or what they want to get out of college, so they are more susceptible to the party pathway that might derail them)?
- What kinds of conversations would be optimal for supporting students who see a sudden GPA drop? How do we initiate those conversations (before probation hits) and craft them to be of benefit to the student?
- What does it look, sound and feel like to be transparent with students about the different “pathways” at IUB? How can these conversations be structured to support and empower students, rather than leaving them feeling defeated or up against insurmountable odds?
- What strategies can we suggest to students to help them “find their people”? Is this an easy task at IUB? Is there more that we might need to know or do to help get students who may feel marginalized and left out of the “party pathway” to realize that they are actually the majority and have many potential peers to connect with? How do we know when a student is facing isolation, before their academics are impacted, and support them?
From Bandwidth Recovery:
- What can advisors do in the context of their advising meetings to promote a growth mindset in students?
- What student populations are currently under-supported at IUB, and what could advisors do to develop programs or practices to support these students?
- What “values affirmation” work could happen within an advising setting? Is this work happening in courses at IUB? How could we know?
- How could the tools presented in Bandwidth Recovery be useful in work with probation students?