Grinnell, a liberal arts college in Iowa, is noted for its open curriculum.

At Grinnell, a Student Retreat Focuses Attention on the Value of the Liberal Arts

For many students, the sophomore year of college is an unsettled one. Choosing courses, thinking about a major, and building social networks can be more difficult in the second year than in the highly structured first year. At a place like Grinnell College—an institution noted for its open curriculum—such problems can be especially pointed. How can a college that allows students extensive freedom in choosing courses ensure that they follow a coherent educational path?

Administrators and faculty at Grinnell think they have found one answer to this question in the second-year retreat, a new program that provides students time to reflect on the purposes and value of a liberal arts education. Developed as part of the “Expanding Knowledge Initiative” that resulted from Grinnell’s new strategic plan, the voluntary retreat was held for the first time last October. Along with a host of other second-year programs, the retreat promises to help Grinnell students be more intentional as they create individualized courses of study.

Turning a Spotlight on the Second Year

Concern about the “first-year experience” has spurred the development of a range of campus programs in recent years, but most schools have paid less attention to the special problems facing sophomores. At Grinnell, the focus of the first year is on “learning how to be a college student,” says Marci Sortor, Grinnell’s vice president for institutional planning: first-year students take a required tutorial and, as at many other schools, participate in orientation activities. But the second year, too, is a time of transition—above all, it is a time when students must begin to make important decisions about their learning on their own.

Advising is one way of addressing the problems of the second year. An open curriculum makes this especially important at Grinnell, where first-year tutorial faculty closely advise students until they declare a major.

Grinnell’s curriculum also depends, however, upon students being self-conscious about the educational decisions they make. And in the second year, when most students decide upon a major and many begin to contemplate future internships and study abroad, students who are uncertain about their goals may feel overwhelmed. That is where the second-year retreat comes in: “that fall semester of their second year is a really teachable moment for having them think about their education,” says Sortor.

The second-year retreat was developed by Sortor and three of Grinnell’s “interdisciplinary fellows”—Jin Feng, a professor of Chinese, Robert Grey, a professor of political science, and Clark Lindgren, a professor of biology. They conceived as of the retreat as a way to take advantage of the opportunity in the second year to help students “be smarter and more self-conscious about their choices.” More broadly, Sortor and her colleagues wanted “students to be more self-conscious [in thinking] about what were their life ambitions, what were their life passions”—and in thinking about how their liberal arts education could serve those passions.

Grinnell's second-year retreat is designed to help students who are uncertain about their educational path.

The 2006 Retreat

When the second-year retreat was held for the first time last October, it attracted a relatively small group of about fifty students and ten faculty and staff. These participants traveled to a wilderness lodge in nearby Boone, Iowa, for three days of presentations and reflections on the retreat’s theme, “Creating My Liberal Arts Life.”

Among the highlights of the retreat were activities that directly engaged current sophomores with the academic trajectories of other Grinnell students. In one event, for example, a panel of Grinnell alumni told stories of how their education in the liberal arts had shaped their lives after college. Some of these alumni had gone on to follow careers related to what they studied as undergraduates; others—including an art major who had become a physician—had taken quite different paths.

In every case, the message from alumni was the same, says Sortor: “it was the education itself that was really critical, the combination of skills that they had picked up that was really essential.” These liberal arts skills—capacities such as writing, critical thinking, and problem solving, which are developed across classes and across disciplines—had provided a foundation upon which the Grinnell graduates had built their lives and careers. It was their broad liberal education, and not necessarily the specific major they chose, that had been crucial.

In another exercise, current second-year students broke into small groups to consider questions raised by the transcripts of former students. Which course-taking decisions made the most sense? What things must one consider in charting an individualized course of study? Weighing such matters in light of “what other people had done,” Sortor says, provided an objective distance that facilitated meaningful discussion of “the kinds of choices a person would want to make.”

Other elements of the retreat, like the keynote address, focused more generally on the meaning of the liberal arts. The retreat concluded with students drafting individual “action plans” identifying specific things that they would start doing, continue doing, and stop doing in the second year of college.

Moving Forward

Sortor and her colleagues learned a number of lessons from the first retreat. Starting this fall, the retreat will be governed by a more explicit theme, which should make the experience more focused. Drawing more participants is also a priority for retreat planners. Sortor hopes that by moving the retreat to a different weekend (instead of fall break, when it was held last year) Grinnell can double or triple the number of students participating without losing the “relaxed and intimate” environment that made students at last year’s retreat feel at ease.

Targeting students who could most benefit from the retreat—such as those who are uncertain about choosing a major—may be one way to keep the scale of the program manageable. And coordinating the retreat more fully with the advising process and with such campus activities as the “majors fair” and sessions on choosing a major could provide further support to those students who have trouble navigating the second year.

Overall, however, student evaluations indicate that the first retreat succeeded in its main goals. Large majorities of participating students agreed or strongly agreed, for example, with such statements as “the retreat has helped me to better understand the meaning(s) of a liberal arts education,” “the retreat has helped me develop a clearer sense of my short-term goals,” and “the retreat has helped me develop a clearer sense of how my time at Grinnell College can help me pursue my life goals.” As such responses indicate, innovative programming like the second-year retreat can help students work through what is for many a difficult stage in their undergraduate careers.

More information about the second-year retreat and Grinnell’s open curriculum are available on the college’s Web site.

AAC&U offers numerous resources on liberal education and the curriculum. In January, AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise campaign released a national report, College Learning for the New Global Century, that includes recommendations on fostering intentional learning and providing students a “compass” to guide their work toward the degree.