Critical and Poststructural Perspectives on Self-Authorship

Baxter Magolda's Longitudinal Research on Self-Authorship

Baxter Magolda's extensive scholarship on self-authorship extends Kegan's (1982, 1994) theory of self-evolution. Kegan, who first used the term self-authorship, described increasingly complex forms of meaning making during adolescence and adulthood. Baxter Magolda (2001, 2009) explored this process in depth through a 25-year longitudinal study of predominantly White adults ages 18–43 who attended a selective college. Most recently, a team of researchers, led by Baxter Magolda and Patricia King, refined the understanding of self-authorship through the qualitative results of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNSLAE). Using a more racially diverse sample across six schools, WNSLAE is a 4-year mixed methods longitudinal study of college students’ development toward self-authorship and liberal arts learning outcomes (Baxter Magolda & King, 2012).

Self-authorship is a constructivist-developmental theory. Kegan (1982) explained that constructivism is “the notion that we constitute reality, rather than somehow happen upon it” (p. 9); developmentalism is the evolution of self toward increased complexity. Individuals are the center of analysis in constructivist-developmental theories (Kegan, 1982). Through its constructivist and holistic approach to development, self-authorship theory fits into the second-wave student development theories, as described in Chapter 2 of this volume.

Self-authorship is the internal capacity to construct one's beliefs, relationships, and sense of self (Baxter Magolda, 2001, 2009). For a self-authoring person, “the source of beliefs, values, identity, and nature of social relations exists inside the person in his or her internal psychological world rather than being dictated by those around him or her” (Baxter Magolda & King, 2012, p. 13). Self-authorship is a holistic theory because it integrates development in ways of making meaning of knowledge (cognitive development), relationships with others (interpersonal development), and sense of self (intrapersonal development) (Baxter Magolda, 2001). Complexity in all three domains of development is necessary to reach self-authorship.

Individuals are situated within a developmental continuum that spans from an external orientation, referred to as following external formulas, to an internal orientation, which is self-authorship. As individuals develop internal voice while moving along the continuum, they are situated within the crossroads. The crossroads combines “external and internal orientations. People enter the crossroads as they begin to question external authorities … and find their way out of the crossroads when their internal voices have developed sufficient strength to coordinate external influence” (Baxter Magolda & King, 2012, p. 14). Based on findings from WNSLAE, 10 positions exist along this external to internal continuum; “Development across this continuum is better characterized as undulating, cyclical, or wavelike than linear, more like a swiveling helix than a fixed, straight line” (Baxter Magolda & King, 2012, p.16).

Applying Self-Authorship to Diverse Student Populations

Researchers have applied self-authorship theory to diverse student populations, including high-risk, Latino/a, and lesbian students. That body of research focuses on individuals more so than the oppressive contexts in which individuals are situated. For example, research on “high-risk” students, who are defined as possessing characteristics such as poor academic background, first-generation status, and/or low socioeconomic status, revealed that they exhibited self-authored ways of knowing earlier than Baxter Magolda's participants (Pizzolato, 2003). They developed internalized values prior to college, which sustained their college aspirations despite external formulas that did not support their goals or perceived sense of self.

Abes and Jones (2004) applied Baxter Magolda's scholarship on self-authorship to study the sexual orientation identity of lesbian college students. They found that developing an internal voice facilitated students’ ability to make their own meaning of their lesbian identity and its relationship to other social identities. Abes and Jones acknowledged that students’ development occurred within the context of heterosexism but did not challenge this context. Instead, they focused on how students made meaning of their identity within this oppressive context. Torres's longitudinal study applied self-authorship theory to understand the development of Latino/a college students (Torres & Hernández, 2007). Results revealed a similar self-authoring process as described by Baxter Magolda, as well as the additional “developmental task” of making meaning of racism. By focusing on the individual, Torres and Hernández did not challenge racism but rather described the individual's development in a racist reality. Indeed, they present some students as less developed than the norm because of this additional developmental task, describing their development as “stagnating” (p. 564) or at a standstill (p. 567).

Research with diverse populations has made important contributions to holistically understanding identity. However, the primary focus on the individual rather than oppressive contexts perpetuates systems of oppression that marginalize college students. To address this limitation, critical and poststructural perspectives, which foreground context, may be applied.

Validating Students with Oppressed Identities as Knowers

Self-authorship depends on students seeing themselves as knowers, an idea related to cognitive development. Cognitive development, which describes an individual's increasingly complex perception of the nature of knowledge (among others, Baxter Magolda, 1992), relies on students’ capacity to understand themselves as valid sources of knowledge. As described in Chapter 3, critical perspectives, such as Black feminist thought and indigenous ways of knowing, challenge normative assumptions about cognitive development.

Rethinking development and self-authorship consistent with standpoint theory is necessary.

Critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001), through its emphasis on counternarratives, also centers people of color as knowers with stories that need to be centered. For instance, African American students’ perceptions of campus racism are centered as true rather than questioned as overreaction. An inclusive reconceptualization of self-authorship would center experience as knowing, making it the norm rather than an obstacle to overcome.

One question that might arise in response to this critical critique is that some research suggests that students with oppressed identities develop cognitive complexity more rapidly than dominant students. The rationale is that oppressive contexts require marginalized students to develop an awareness of multiple perspectives and see oneself as a knower (Abes & Jones, 2004; Pizzolato, 2003). Although this increased developmental pace might occur for some students with oppressed identities, this possibility does not take into consideration the personal cost associated with such development. What is personally at stake for a student who must resist against oppression in order to develop cognitively? For instance, what are the emotional and psychological costs for students with a physical disability defining their own truths in the face of infantilizing and limiting behaviors and policies? Uncritically examining the assumptions inherent in developing complex cognitive capacity perpetuates systems of privilege. Validating multiple forms of knowing—and possibilities for self-authorship—to include nondominant epistemologies is a more empowering approach to development.

Valuing Communal Knowledge, Relationships, and Sense of Self

Grounded in individualistic notions, self-authorship privileges relationships and knowledge grounded in the separation of self from others, or individuation. Pizzolato and colleagues (2010, 2012) describe a different way of thinking about self-authorship. Pizzolato (2010) considered how cultural differences may influence self-authorship, specifically how East Asian students defined their sense of self in relationship to others. Rather than the normative ideals of independence based on Western culture, East Asian students may value the “collective good over autonomy and individual gain … and use collective goals and values to inform their meaning-making” (p. 193). Pizzolato and colleagues (2012) suggested reconsidering the question of “Who am I” (intrapersonal development) to “Who am I in relation to others” and “Who are we” (p. 673). This approach respects cultural values rather than concluding that students who consider the maintenance of relationships in decision making (cognitive development) and relationships (interpersonal development) are less developed because they do not exemplify autonomy.

Likewise, indigenous epistemology critiques dominant assumptions about knowledge. Indigenous epistemology values knowledge developed through community, relationships, and traditions (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). Dominant epistemologies that ground cognitive development perpetuate individualized knowing as evidence of complexity. When educators try to fit this approach to knowledge production onto students for whom it does not fit, they stifle self-authorship. Reconceptualizing self-authorship to include non-Western epistemologies is more inclusive of different ways of knowing, interacting with others, and understanding identities.

Recognizing the Difficulty and Risks Associated with Agency and Authenticity

Although different in nature, agency and authenticity are both concepts central to self-authorship that require students to live according to their beliefs and values. When situated within systems of oppression, both are also dangerous and risky, and to some extent impossible, for students with marginalized identities. Danger, risk, and impossibility suggest rethinking self-authorship.

With agency risky and sometimes impossible, students with oppressed identities do not always have the privilege of creating mutual relationships where they can assert their perspectives and have their needs respected. For instance, this marginalized dynamic is often at play when queer students try to develop mature relationships with parents who refuse to accept their identity, when students of color feel powerless in relationships with White faculty, or when Muslim students’ fear for their physical safety trumps relationship-building. It is inequitable, therefore, to assess marginalized students’ interpersonal development using normative theories dependent on mutuality.

Self-authorship also depends on mature intrapersonal development. Complex identity construction requires the capacity to live according to self-chosen values and beliefs, enabling a person to internally develop a sense of self rather than relying on external influences for self-definition (Baxter Magolda, 2001). Applying critical perspectives to intrapersonal development foregrounds how context shapes identity. An intersectional analysis, for example, describes how intersecting systems of oppression shape the self. Intersectionality shifts the conversation from identity as an enduring sense of self to an authentic self. Authenticity describes the “day-to-day, moment-to-moment negotiations and decision about managing who we are, given the current context” while becoming “more aware of the intersection of privileged and oppressed identities and the ways in which a larger structure of inequality pattern[s] the ways in which these intersections [are] expressed” (Jones, Kim, & Skendall, 2012, p. 711).

Situating identity within intersecting oppressions, however, results in the impossibility of authenticity. From an intersectional lens, identity is a process of internally negotiating privileged identities while simultaneously managing the perceptions of others that shape how students experienced their oppressed identities (Jones, 2009). That is, intersectionality reveals how privilege provided choices in identity performance, whereas oppression constrained choices, requiring strategies to minimize harm. For instance, an African American, lower social class, trans* student manages perceptions of faculty, staff, and peers who render them invisible and unintelligible, while also internally making sense of relationships among their identities. Therefore, even if a person were internally defined, oppressive contexts are always present and need to be managed, making authenticity impossible. Jones (2010) and Jones and colleagues (2012), therefore, reconsidered the nature of self-authorship, presenting it as a fluid process that responds to power structures embedded within changing contexts rather than a developmental continuum that moves toward complexity.

Recognizing the Performativity of Identity

A poststructural analysis of self-authorship extends Jones and colleagues’ call for a more fluid and performative perspective on self-authorship, urging fluidity not only in the nature of self-authorship but also the nature of development. As do the critical perspectives that ground the previous three themes, a poststructural perspective foregrounds context. Poststructuralism, however, centers context for the purpose of deconstructing it (Sullivan, 2003). For example, queer theory, which is a poststructural perspective that focuses on sexuality and gender, deconstructs the heteronormative discourses (such as language, law, and policies) that shape identity (Sullivan, 2003). Language, for instance, categorizes people through labels that limit the meaning students attribute to their identity. Deconstruction reveals identity to be performed, fluid, and uncategorizable (Butler, 1990, 2006). Identity as performance means that students create their identities through their everyday actions. With no fixed categories toward which to progress, there is not a continuum of developmental complexity that culminates in a complex notion of self. Development is redefined as the performance itself with no complexity or category attached. Identity performativity is not limited only to sexuality and gender, with examples in the literature of race (Willie, 2003) and ability (McRuer, 2006) as performance.

Critical Race Theory Reconceptualization of Self-Authorship

Hernández applied critical race theory (CRT) to rethink the meaning of self-authorship. Hernández examined the self-authoring process for Mexican American women who were activists in their Latino college community (Hernández, 2012, in press). She did so by redefining the meaning of the three domains of development to include the reality of racism, which is consistent with the students’ life stories. Hernández's reconceptualization does not assume activism as evidence of developmental complexity, but as a way of centering particular stories that might otherwise be overlooked in normative developmental theory. Hernández revised the cognitive dimension, which asks, “How do I know?” to “How to I make meaning of my social world?” (Hernández, in press). Applying CRT, cognitive development focuses on how students interpret context from the vantage point of their social identities. She revised the intrapersonal dimension from “Who am I?” to “How does my social world shape my sense of self as a racialized being?” In asking the women to self-identify their ethnic identity, they were invited to reflect on their lives as racialized beings, what their identity labels meant to them, and the implications of these choices. She revised the interpersonal dimension of self-authorship from “What relationships do I want with others?” to “What relationships do I want with others for the benefit of my social world?” This revision addresses CRT's commitment to social justice by expanding the focus of relationships beyond personal relationships to those where students recognize their roles in the community and their power as political actors (Hernández, in press). These revisions incorporate resistance through activism not as evidence of developmental complexity but as a way of rethinking development to include context.

Queer Theory Reconceptualization of Self-Authorship

True to its deconstructive nature, a poststructural reconceptualization of self-authorship looks nothing like the original. All remnants of heteronormativity are erased. Abes and Kasch (2007) applied queer theory to deconstruct how heteronormativity shapes assumptions about the development and self-authorship of lesbian college students. Applying three tenets of queer theory—heteronormativity, performativity, and liminality—they proposed a different conceptualization of development called queer authorship.

Queer authorship focuses on students’ resistance through identity performatives. Performative resistance in this manner does not mean purposeful challenges to systems of oppression, but instead, resistance through living—students expressing, or trying to express, who they are. When students live their life in a manner inconsistent with dominant norms, they change possibilities associated with norms. For instance, when a queer student practices a religion that others tell them is inconsistent with their sexuality, that student changes what it means to be a religious queer person (Abes & Kasch, 2007). What was impossible is now possible because of that student's action. Although not dismantling systems of oppression, the student has subtly changed the context in which they are situated. Framed in this way, resistance is possible for students with oppressed identities regardless of their knowledge validation, agency, and authenticity. Through this perspective on development, students with oppressed identities are resistors no matter how their complexity is assessed through a constructivist perspective.