| Institutions of higher education are increasingly called upon to prepare graduates for lifelong civic participation. In response, many campuses have created structured opportunities for students to become engaged through service-learning, public dialogues, action research, and community-based learning. As contemporary American life becomes more complex, graduates are also expected to use an internally generated meaning-making system that guides their thinking and feeling, and their relating to self and others. The development of this internal belief system, or capacity for self-authorship (Kegan, 1982, 1994), has become a central goal of higher education.;This qualitative study examines the experiences of eight undergraduate students who enrolled in a course on civic engagement and democratic practice. This course was selected because it integrates learning in three developmental domains (cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal) through opportunities for students to analyze historical and theoretical texts, develop and share their personal narrative, and conduct a community action project. The data includes observation of a semester-long course, students' written work (eight reflection papers and a final paper), and two semi-structured interviews, including the Subject-Object Interview (Lahey, Souvaine, Kegan, Goodman, & Felix, 1988).;Three themes in students' experience are explored: beliefs about the nature and sources of knowledge, learning about self through managing roles and relationships, and learning from connecting theory, practice and action. This study also examines the relationship between students' developmental perspectives, which ranged from "socialized" to "self-authoring," and their experiences in the course (Kegan, 1994). Students' stories are first presented in theme-based pairs that illustrate how students with differing developmental perspectives experience similar aspects of the course. Analysis of groups with similar perspectives further reveals how development mediates learning.;The findings suggest that students with a more self-authored perspective were better equipped to meet the demands of the course. Integrating the findings with two established frameworks for promoting adult and college student development, this study concludes with recommendations for educators who wish to provide experiences that optimize the balance between challenge and support to meets students' varying developmental perspectives. It concludes with examples of how developmentally integrative pedagogy can be structured to support self-authorship. |
