Learning Partnerships: Theory and Models of Practice to Educate for Self-Authorship

While a common goal of higher education is to improve student learning to prepare young adults for the professional, civic and personal challenges of their lives, few institutions have a model to facilitate these outcomes. Learning Partnerships offers a grounded theory and practical examples of how these objectives can be achieved at the college course, program, and institutional levels.

The book takes as its foundation Marcia Baxter Magolda’s "Learning Partnerships Model" based on her seventeen-year longitudinal study of young adults’ learning and development from their undergraduate years through their thirties. Based on nearly a thousand participant narratives, the model offers an empirically grounded yet flexible approach to promote "self-authorship." Marcia Baxter Magolda describes the nature of self-authorship--its centrality to the learning goals of cognitive maturity, an integrated identity, mature relationships, and effective citizenship--and the Model.

The book then documents examples of actual practice and the learning outcomes they have yielded. The settings include community college and undergraduate courses, exchange and internship programs, residential life, a Masters’ program, faculty development and student affairs organization.

Learning Partnerships offers models for all educators--faculty and student affairs staff alike--who work to balance guidance and learner responsibility to prepare students for the complexity of the twenty-first century.