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Practicing Liberal Education:
Formative Themes in the Re-invention of Liberal Learning
Carol Geary Schneider
President, Association of American Colleges and Universities |
Though liberal education has assumed many forms
across different times and places, it has always been concerned
with important educational aims: cultivating intellectual
and ethical judgment, helping students comprehend and negotiate
their relationship to the larger world, and preparing graduates
for lives of civic responsibility and leadership. On the merits,
then, we might expect that liberal education would be the
uncontested preference of virtually everyone who goes to college.
And yet, American society today exhibits a striking ambivalence
towards the traditions of “liberal” or “liberal
arts” education. Liberal education is at one and the
same time prized, despised, revised and disguised.
Prized? Liberal education is recognizably
the philosophy of choice at the nation’s most famous
institutions, the campuses where admission is seen as virtually
synonymous with the expansion of opportunity. There is, moreover,
a persistent identification of liberal education with democratic
freedom, scientific progress and excellence that goes back
to the revolutionary period when many civic and political
leaders both extolled the liberal arts and also challenged
them to embrace the scientific and practical needs of the
new republic. W.E.B. du Bois reaffirmed the interchangeability
of “liberal education” and “excellence”
when he argued, a century ago, that future leaders in the
African-American community deserved a college-level liberal
education—that is, the best kind of higher education,
not just narrow occupational training. Most accredited colleges
and universities still espouse this liberal education ideal
and typically require that their students take some fraction
of their studies in courses and programs aligned with the
broader aims of education.
Despised? Many analysts and policy leaders
declare without apology that liberal education is already
being consigned to the dustbin of history. Markets, they sniff,
are keyed to short-term outcomes and have no patience for
forms of learning that pay off over a lifetime. Practical
studies will sell; the rest will just wither away. First generation,
low-income, and adult learners in particular, such observers
contend, need job training rather than intellectual development.
Like school leaders in the twentieth century, these higher
education realists are content to provide “elite”
education to elites and vocational skills to everyone else.
Other observers, more critical of the academy itself, believe
that liberal education is falling victim to its own rigidity.
The liberal arts, these critics suggest, are so ensconced
in disciplinary silos and so resistant to the practical needs
of the wider society, that they will surely go the way of
the classics, moving inexorably from centrality to subsidized
marginality.
Revised? At the
Association of American Colleges and Universities, we see
a much more complex picture—a picture at once both promising
and constrained. The truth is that liberal education at the
start of the twenty-first century is anything but a moribund
tradition. Historically, the practice of liberal education
has changed radically over the centuries, and it is in the
midst of far-reaching—if largely unreported—change
today.
As we work with literally hundreds of colleges and universities,
my colleagues and I can see plainly that the nation’s
campuses are dotted with a vibrant new generation of innovative
programs and pedagogies. The majority of these innovations
are indisputably re-inventions of a more traditional liberal
education for this new global era and for today’s newly
diverse population of students. Indeed, we are starting to
see the outlines of an emerging consensus on what this newly
reinvigorated liberal education should entail and even on
the imperative of ensuring that more students—including
first generation and adult students—can gain from its
benefits.
Three Formative Themes in the
Re-invention of Liberal Education
As we survey developments across the spectrum of higher education
reform, three major themes emerge as keys to the newly engaged
and practical liberal education for the twenty-first century.
These themes are intellectual judgment, social responsibility,
and integrative learning.
Inquiry and Intellectual Judgment: College and universities
no longer assume that analytical capability emerges automatically
as students take courses. Instead, faculty members are designing
new curricula and new teaching strategies—online as
well as face-to-face—to help today’s diverse students
develop strong analytical and communication skills, honed
“across-the-curriculum” and at progressively more
sophisticated levels. From intensive first-year seminars on
liberal arts topics to writing in the disciplines programs
to undergraduate research to senior capstone projects and
courses, colleges and universities are pioneering new educational
practices clearly intended to teach all students how to make
sense of complexity, how to find and use evidence, and how
to apply their knowledge to new problems and unscripted questions.
In doing so, they are bringing new vitality to one of the
oldest and most enduring goals of liberal education: the thoughtful
and creative use of human reason.
Social Responsibility and Civic Engagement: There
is also a pervasive new focus on putting social and civic
responsibility into the curriculum. From Hawaii to Indianapolis
to the Bronx, faculty at every kind of college and university
are providing students with real-world experience and rich
opportunities to address social problems in cooperation with
others. This revival of civic engagement and social responsibility
is happening in nearly every field—from science courses
taught through the lenses of important contemporary social
and ethical questions such as HIV/AIDS to social justice issues
addressed in professional fields to internships, service learning
and field-based projects where students work with the community
to solve important problems. Simultaneously, the diversity
and global education movements also have developed a wealth
of programs—curricular and co-curricular—that
help students develop essential intercultural skills and a
sophisticated sense of how to collaborate “across boundaries”
in a diverse but still highly fractured and violent world.
Collaborative, intercultural, and community-based learning
are the new civic frontiers for our twenty-first century world
of diversity, contestation, and inescapable interdependence.
Integrative and Culminating Learning: Educational
leaders are rapidly inventing new forms of integrative and
culminating studies for their students. From first year “learning
communities” to senior year interdisciplinary general
education courses to capstone projects and the popularity
of field-based learning, today’s students now have multiple,
structured opportunities to make connections across disciplines
and fields, to connect theories to practice, and even to engage
their own lived experiences in the context of what they are
learning in general education and in their majors. This commitment
to integrative learning helps ensure that students will learn
to take context and complexity into account when they apply
their analytical skills to challenging problems. The new importance
of integrative learning also holds the power to bridge—at
last—the long-standing cultural divide in which one
set of disciplines, the arts and sciences, has been regarded
as intellectual but not practical, while the professional
fields are viewed as practical but, for that very reason,
inherently illiberal. Analysis and application are starting
to come together, where once they were presented as alternative
educational pathways.
Each of these new designs for undergraduate learning is intended
to help today’s diverse students achieve the traditional
benefits of liberal education: intellectual acuity and judgment,
civic and social leadership, expanded horizons. Taken together,
these new designs for what we might call the “liberal
arts of practice” have the potential to make college
learning more engaged, better connected with communities beyond
the campus, more “hands-on,” and, in the long
run, more educationally powerful.
Disguised? Even
as specific practices within liberal education are being reinvented
and reinvigorated, the tradition itself is largely disguised
from public notice. The educational innovations described
above are heavily promoted by the academy but rarely described
in campus promotional materials as “liberal” or
“liberal arts” education. Students who participate
in them may never even be told that they are engaged in contemporary
forms of liberal education. Graduate students preparing to
teach spend virtually no time considering their own role either
in these innovations or in the larger traditions of liberal
learning.
Given this conspiracy of voluntary silence, there is very
little public understanding or even awareness of liberal education,
despite its enduring influence on both established and innovative
curricula. Studies show that the public does not value it
as named, even though the same public places high value on
the outcomes—such as analytical judgment, social responsibility,
and economic opportunity—to which liberal education
leads. Campus leaders report that students also don’t
know what liberal or liberal arts education is and that many
faculty are uncertain.
The nation is thus in danger of squandering an extraordinary
and unprecedented opportunity. With millions of students of
all ages and backgrounds both aspiring to higher learning
and actually enrolling, a new majority of Americans could,
in principle, now achieve the kind of capacious and public-spirited
liberal education once reserved for a tiny elite. But it is
hard to insist on the best when you don’t even know
that the best is an option. And without public support and
student demand, these new educational practices are likely
to remain both underdeveloped and vulnerable.
AAC&U’s 2002 report, Greater Expectations: A New
Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, recommends
that every college student deserves a liberal education, one
redefined to embrace and address the way knowledge is actually
used in the world, including the world of work and civil society.
Strongly endorsing the trends described above, the report
calls for a new synthesis between liberal and practical education
throughout the educational experience: “Liberal education,”
the report asserts, “must . . . become consciously,
intentionally pragmatic, while it remains conceptually rigorous;
its test will be in the effectiveness of graduates to use
knowledge thoughtfully in the wider world.”
Sounding the Call
In this context of opportunity and opposition, the challenges
confronting today’s educational leaders are two.
The first is summoning the vision, the will, and the long-term
commitment to coalesce innovations already flowering around
us into more intentional, connected, and cumulatively powerful
frameworks for all students’ learning.
And the second is the willingness to call these innovations
what they are: a twenty-first century vision for an inclusive
liberal education.
The future of liberal education and the future of our core
educational missions are one and the same.
Formative Themes in the Re-invention of Liberal
Education With a Mapping of Contemporary Reforms
1. Cultivating Inquiry Skills and Intellectual Judgment
- “Across-the-Curriculum”
Student Learning Outcomes: goals for learning
articulated across the entire curriculum, guiding liberal
arts and sciences disciplines and professional studies alike;
First Year Experiences: first year programs and
seminars that help students learn what is expected of them
educationally and work proactively to develop better analytical,
research and communication—including technological
literacies—skills;
Skill-Intensive Content Courses: designs for practicing
important skills recurrently “across-the-curriculum”
in courses explicitly tagged for their emphasis on intensive
writing, technology, quantitative reasoning, second language,
and, sometimes, ethical reasoning;
Undergraduate Research: involving students in
inquiry and hands-on research.
2. Social Responsibility and Civic Engagement
Big Questions: imaginative ways of teaching the
arts and sciences that connect the content of these courses
to important questions in the larger world;
Field-Based Learning: a new emphasis on internships,
service learning and other forms of practice that help students
connect their academic learning with “real-world”
experience;
Diversity, Global, and Civic Engagement: a wealth
of programs, both curricular and co-curricular, intended
to foster civic engagement, diversity and global learning,
and social responsibility;
Community-Based Research: a growing emphasis on
community-based research, often done collaboratively.
3. Integrative and Culminating Studies, including
Liberal/Professional: new connections between
liberal and professional education (see #1 above);
Learning Communities: thematically linked courses
in different disciplines that students take as a “set”
with the expectation that they will examine important human,
scientific, or societal questions from multiple points of
view;
Advanced Interdisciplinary General Education:
courses that invite comparison and connection;
Portfolios and E-Portfolios: documenting and assessing
students’ intellectual progress over time;
Capstones: capstone courses and/or experiences
that help students integrate their learning both in the
major and in general education arenas;
Culminating Projects and Assessments: required
for completion of the degree.
Carol Geary Schneider, AAC&U, 2003
Practicing Liberal Education:
Formative Themes in the Re-invention of Liberal Learning
We invite your response to this analysis. Feel free to
respond below or send your response to any or all of the following
questions via e-mail to: humphreys@aacu.org.
How important are these formative themes and contemporary
reforms (see previous page) on your campus? In your view,
which hold the most promise?
Are there important aspects of liberal education that you
wish were more prominently discussed in the national debates
about the future of undergraduate education?
Does your campus use the language of liberal education in
its promotional or curricular materials?
Have you engaged key constituents (e.g., trustees, donors,
community, business and school leaders) in discussions about
the importance of liberal education in today's society? If
so, how?
How can AAC&U work with you to further amplify and expand
the national dialogue on liberal education on campus and with
the public?
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