SUBMISSION IS NOW CLOSED

The end of the academic year marks one of those rare occasions when you can reflect on your accomplishments and lessons learned. You count the programs, learning outcomes, assessment projects, policy changes, budget choices and other decisions made that have helped you to shape your work and your institution.

There isn't much time to reflect because a new year awaits you. There are new staff to be introduced, agendas to set, curricula to be developed, standards to be established, and programs to be launched. Once again, you find yourself assuming the power and responsibility to shape your work, your institution, perhaps even to shape education.

We invite you to think about how you assume the power and responsibility to shape education. In March of 2007, the members of ACPA and NASPA will gather for a Joint Meeting to discuss "Our Power and Responsibility to Shape Education." Among the extraordinary opportunities this joint meeting will afford us is the chance we will all have to learn from one another. By sharing our accomplishments and lessons learned in general interest sessions, round tables, sponsored sessions, or pre-meeting sessions, we will all grow as scholars and practitioners. Your expertise and wise counsel will help us frame our discussion of how we shape not only higher education, but education in every sector. We invite you to submit a program proposal for the 2007 Joint Meeting.

To help you prepare a program proposal, we have provided the following questions to guide your reflection. These questions illustrate some of the themes that have emerged in our discussion of "Our Power and Responsibility to Shape Education."

How do student affairs educators help shape education and how do we get to the next level?

• What are the strengths of collaborative partnerships with student affairs and academic affairs colleagues, as well as with students, community leaders, and alumni? How do we create a learning environment in and out of the classroom that is responsive to the needs of students and the needs of the educators seeking to support learning?
• How do we use Learning Reconsidered in providing the educational framework for student learning outcomes across the academy?
• As educators, we have the considerable responsibility to help shape the learning outcomes for our students and ourselves - how do we engage in the process of establishing learning outcomes and ensuring their realization? How do we hold ourselves accountable for the work we do?
• How are we working with educational stakeholders such as parents, college and university presidents, faculty, legislatures, governing boards, and the public to have an impact on the future of education?
• How do we create a seamless or coherent interface between K-12 and higher education? How do we shape an educational journey for our students that responds to the promises and pitfalls of K - 12 education they may have experienced?
• How are we capitalizing on the unique and diverse missions of higher education institutions? How do we realize the partnerships that are essential between differing institutional types and between higher education and our communities?
• How do we collaborate across the academy to elevate higher education as a whole? How can we provide the institutional change and structures to support these collaborations?

How will we respond to and assume responsibility for the changing face of our students?

• Students as a group are different today from previous generations. Among those issues that are transforming our work is the increasing diversity of our student population. Diverse by ethnicity, age, culture, sexual orientation, lived experience, social and economic class, engagement, religious and spiritual choices, and in their abilities; we find that we are working to enliven a community of scholars that is reflective of the nation and world in which we work. How will we transform our work and our education to respond to this new community?
• What will we do with students who find themselves deeper and deeper in debt - often the result of rising tuition bills? What will we say to the student who chooses his or her academic major with an eye on how the career field may allow him or her to pay off their mounting educational debt?
• How will we engage, inform, teach, and enliven a generation of students who not only want to make a difference but who have the means and ability to make a difference?
• How do we encourage student's actions and behavior to be congruent with values of this new diverse community?
• How do we bridge the great divide between students of plenty and students in need?
• How can we teach students to embrace their power and responsibility to shape their world through action, unrest, protest, and work? In Learning Reconsidered and Learning Reconsidered 2, we value civic engagement, interpersonal and intrapersonal competence and humanitarianism. How do we shape our work to benefit student learning outcomes in these areas?
• How do we respond to the growing number of students who arrive at our campuses with psychological disabilities?

How will we assume responsibility for shaping the scholarship and practice of our field?

• What do we need in the areas of scholarship and practice? Where will we find the new ideas? Who is creating the scholarship and new knowledge in our field? Are practitioners creating new scholarship? How do we share this knowledge that informs our work with others?
• How can professional associations help practitioners and scholars digest the learning and new knowledge in our field? What is the significant, recent scholarship in our profession? How can the personal/professional networks within our professional associations relate to our responsibilities as educators?
• Is the last time you were a reflective scholar-practitioner when you were in graduate school? How might we transform our work world to allow time for people to be reflective?
• What can we do to further the research regarding the seven outcome categories in Learning Reconsidered? How can we disseminate this research and practice widely to have an impact on the most students?
• Some of us weren't trained to manage facilities and money, we weren't trained to raise funds or write grant proposals, but we find ourselves doing all of this and more. Where is the knowledge and/or training gap in these areas?
• What are the essential skills and knowledge necessary for our work? How do we ensure adequate professional development opportunities to build on those skills and knowledge?
• How might we look to students to teach us? What research interests and/or new scholarship might be present in the "mid-dissertation graduate student" or the undergraduate researcher that would help us to think in new and creative ways and/or might allow us to see the world anew?
• To ensure the future influence of student affairs, how are we recruiting the best and brightest of undergraduates and graduates to the field of student affairs?

How do we promote and encourage learning beyond the campus?

• We live in an interconnected world that is fast becoming a global community. As such, we have shared responsibility for creating scholars and practitioners who will be the leaders in defining and responding to world issues. Whether world health issues like the HIV/AIDS pandemic or global politics, the lines between the campus community and the global community are very blurred.
• How do we actualize student learning, as defined in Learning Reconsidered, and provide the engine for students to affect change in the new global society?
• How do we exercise our power to shape the education for the next generation of global leaders?
• How do we enlarge our own understanding of the world?
• How do we encourage students, scholars, and teachers to go into the world to experience the learning that may be intrinsic in study abroad or international service learning?
• How do we support the experiences of international students studying in the United States?
• How do we help to create interconnected learning that allows the varied parts of our communities - scientists and therapists, sociologists, first-year students, and all others - to engage in a process of problem solving?
• How do we effectively prepare future leaders while managing external expectations/interventions presented by state and federal governments?

How do we become purveyors of sustainable learning and leading?

• We hear the cry for sustainable societies and the words evoke a sense of ecology and sustainable communities, stewardship responsibility and civically engaged people. How do we utilize our power to create opportunities, experiences, and environments that will teach responsible citizenship and social justice during college and beyond?
• How will we continue to advance student learning and develop leaders who desire to make a difference and have the capacity to do so? Building on the seven categories in Learning Reconsidered, how can we can educate and motivate students to use their new skills in the community?
• What, in our own work and preparation programs, encourages us to see "making a difference" as a part of our professional and personal calling?
• How are we being good stewards of all our resources: physical, fiscal, and human?
• As we develop "green buildings" and sustainable campus communities, how do we make sure that the effort to create sustainable communities is available to all, not just the wealthiest institutions?

How do we shape technology to assist us in meeting our goals rather than allowing technology to shape higher education or our profession?

• Is student affairs positioned to keep pace with changes in technology? How can we use technology to enhance student learning, community development, and delivery of services?
• How will technology help us to respond to the need for data driven decision making?
• How do we interface with students and with each other?
• How does technology impede or enhance students' communication with their parents? How does this same technology alter our interface with our students' parents?
• What are going to be the next technology challenges and opportunities?
• What is it about the current student generation that allows them to share freely on blogs, Facebook.com, MySpace.com, and through other vehicles - what is hidden and what is shared in a big way? Is the art of face-to-face conversation quickly becoming a lost art?