Regrettably, most of us committed to liberal
education agree that the outcomes of an undergraduate
liberal education are not widely
understood or valued by the general public.
While the college degree is universally recognized
as the key to economic and social mobility,
what lies behind that credential—the
educational experience, its full value and its
purposes—is more or less ignored. In general,
in the popular imagination, undergraduate education
is a commodity: students and their
families are customers, faculty are service providers, and institutions compete to
provide accommodations. Specific attention
to the full purposes of liberal education is
even less focused; and in light of that, it is
now rarely considered a necessary element of
undergraduate education.
Because of its neglect of the core purposes
of liberal education, the academy itself bears
some responsibility for popular misperceptions—or, lamentably, ignorance of what liberal education promises.
There has been, and remains, a “triad” of interrelated core purposes for liberal education: the epistemic (coming to know, discovery, and the advancing of knowledge and understanding); the eudemonic (the fuller realization of the learner, the actualizing of the person’s potential—classically to achieve individual well-being and happiness); and the civic (the understanding that learning puts the learner
in relation to what is other, to community and
its diversity in the broadest sense, as well as
the responsibility that comes from sustaining the community and the civic qualities that
make both open inquiry and self-realization
possible).
On one level, we have lost track of this
complexity—focusing in the academy only on
the epistemic. On another level, we have
hardly attended to the issue of purpose at all.
The gaining and transfer of knowledge and
discovery, the “epistemic” purpose of liberal
education, has been emphasized at the expense
of the other core purposes—namely, fostering
self-discovery and well-being, and establishing
the relationship between knowledge and
responsibility for what is beyond self, the “civic”
purpose. While other institutions, such as
church or the family, and other educational or
training experiences certainly can separately
contribute to a dimension of this triad of core
purposes, liberal education is unique in that it
contributes to achieving all three purposes and
reveals their interdependency.
These core purposes determined the original
missions of the many colleges and universities
that were founded to provide a liberal
education. These institutions forged a de facto
social contract. For its part, the college or university
was expected to contribute to what is
known, to teach and discover, to serve as a
positive and reinforcing context for the emotional
and moral development of young
adults, and to encourage greater responsibility
for the common good. In return, society supported
both the institution and the conditions
of liberty required to sustain open inquiry. Although
some colleges and universities may no
longer define their missions in terms of the
three core purposes of liberal education, the
great preponderance of institutions still do. It
is not clear, however, that these institutions
actually give priority to the practices that instantiate
the core purposes. Nor is it clear
they recognize that the intentional development
of all three interrelated purposes results
in confirmable outcomes affecting the full development
of students.
In recent years, much excellent work has
been devoted to the assessment of learning
outcomes. This work helps to establish
whether and how the epistemic purpose of
liberal education is being achieved. However,
the scope of assessment should not be restricted
to a single aspect of liberal education.
Attention to each of the core purposes—the
epistemic, the eudemonic, and the civic—is
necessary to achieve the full promise of liberal
education. The Bringing Theory to Practice
project is about demonstrating that, as they
are actualized in particular educational practices,
all three core purposes produce outcomes—
effects and affects, including behavioral results
or consequences as well as dispositional
patterns, attitudes, and inclinations—that
can be documented and studied.
Student disengagement
The Bringing Theory to Practice project was
founded on the premise of a connection between
the widespread misunderstanding, devaluation,
and neglect of the core purposes of
undergraduate liberal education, on the one
hand, and certain patterns of disengagement
exhibited by a significant and growing number
of students, on the other.* Multiple-year national
data show that, even excepting students
who drop out of school, 40 to 60 percent of all adolescents are “chronically
disengaged” from their academic
experiences (Blum and
Libby 2004). This student disengagement
is expressed in a
variety of ways, from drug and
alcohol abuse to cheating,
from nonclinical forms of depression
to suicide attempts.
More than 30 percent of
students abuse alcohol, for example;
nearly half of these are repeat abusers
whose objective is to disengage completely by
becoming “wasted” to the point of passing out.
Indeed, over the past decade or so, campuses
nationwide have reported dramatic increases in
binge drinking. “Students [are] often stuporous
in class, if they get there at all,” explains Hara
Estroff Marano, editor of Psychology Today and member of the Bringing Theory to Practice
advisory board. “The heaviest drinking occurs
on weekends, beginning Thursday, but the effects
increasingly hang over the whole week.”
After counseling many students, Paul Joffe, a
psychologist at the University of Illinois at
Champaign-Urbana, has concluded that “at
bottom binge drinking is a quest for authenticity
and intensity of experience. It gives young
people something all their own to talk about,
and sharing stories about the path to passing
out is often a primary purpose. It’s an inverted
world in which drinking to oblivion (disengagement)
is the way to feel connected and
alive” (Marano 2004).
While it may be the most visible expression
of student disengagement, alcohol abuse is
among a host of behavioral and mental health
issues affecting undergraduates. Somewhat less
visible, for example, is the rising incidence of
depression among college students. Studies
generated by the University of Kansas Counseling
Center suggest that, nationwide, over
40 percent of undergraduates report at least
one incident of depression sufficient to interrupt
their academic work. “Psychological distress
is rampant on college campuses,” says
Marano. “It takes a variety of forms: anxiety
and depression—which are increasingly regarded
as two faces of the same coin—binge
drinking and substance abuse, self-mutilation
and other forms of self-disconnection.” According
to Steven Hyman, provost of Harvard
University and former director of the National
Institute of Mental Health, psychological
distress is now so widespread
among students that it is “interfering
with the core mission
of the university” (Marano
2004).
Overall, the response of colleges
and universities to student
disengagement has been
partial, focused on enforcement
or treatment; rarely have
institutions seen the possibility
of addressing these issues of disengagement
through the outcomes of specific forms of undergraduate
learning. Awareness of the problem
has often led to institutional concern for
liability and, in some cases, to the dismissal of
students who acknowledge experiencing psychological
distress. Only rarely does awareness
lead to campus-wide consideration of the gaps
between academic purposes, expectations, and
practices—gaps that impede student learning,
health, and civic engagement. At most institutions,
where attention to students’ mental
health is relegated to counseling professionals
and where the academic aspect of students’
lives is disconnected from the social and developmental
aspects, faculty and administrators
may be unaware of the full extent of the problem,
and of the possibility of addressing the
manifestations of student well-being and civic
development through academic experiences.
Engaged learning
The development of the “whole person” has
traditionally been the goal of liberal education;
however, on most campuses today, the “whole
person” is fractured into discrete parts. Students
themselves are expected to integrate, cumulatively
and developmentally, what institutional
structures and operations formally divide. By
compartmentalizing students’ intellectual,
emotional, and ethical lives, colleges and universities
dichotomize the various facets of
learning. This paradigm of compartmentalized
learning is extended to campus life: faculty
take care of the intellect, student-services staff
and coaches handle the rest. Accordingly, the
classroom is regarded as the exclusive setting
for “real” learning, which is seen as wholly
separate and different from what takes place
elsewhere.
The Bringing Theory to Practice project began
with the hunch that engaged learning is the
key to reintegrating the epistemic, eudemonic,and civic purposes of liberal education. That is, we believed that by engaging students, by
involving them in demanding service-learning
and community-based research experiences,
the academy could force them to
consider their own privilege; challenge their
assumptions of entitlement and self-indulgence;
help them recognize that learning has
implications for action and use; help them develop
skills and habits of resiliency; and make
them aware of their responsibilities to the
larger community. And further, we believed
that, with these gains, students would be more
likely to transfer academic engagement to
greater personal well-being and to deeper
civic engagement.
It may seem quixotic to describe learning as
a transformative activity. Many students, faculty,
and staff may see no connection between
their lives and the problems facing the community,
the nation, and the world. They may not
feel responsible for others. The many students
who today participate in volunteer programs
may fail to take action to address the problems
they seek temporarily to relieve. In fact, volunteering
may reinforce preconceptions and
stereotypic beliefs held by students. As D. Tad
Roach, headmaster of St. Andrew’s School in
Delaware, puts it, “students may volunteer in a
soup kitchen, and accumulate hundreds of
hours of volunteer service; but if service is not
linked with learning, they are likely to understand
nothing about the systemic socioeconomic
conditions that lead to poverty.
And they are, thereby, unprepared to address
the desperate need for change.”
We have identified service learning and
community-based research as exemplars because
they require active involvement by students
and they have the greatest potential to
transform attitudes, behaviors, and dispositions.
Quite distinct from volunteerism, both
forms of engaged learning require academic
intensity. They entail greater expectations for
students, pushing them beyond the classroom
and beyond the model of learning as the passive
receipt of information. And both forms of
engaged learning can lead students to take
greater responsibility for their learning and for
its connection to both their individual development
and their civic lives. Students come
to recognize that not all learning occurs in the
classroom, and that not all teachers are faculty.
In truth, the Bringing Theory to Practice
project was founded on more than just a hunch.
All of us in higher education have seen the
transformative potential of engaged learning.
We know, for example, that when students are
engaged, when someone else is counting on
them, the incidence and frequency of abusive
behaviors and depression decrease. We also
know that students themselves report increased
confidence and a positive sense of
self-value as results of experiences that take
them “out of the bubble” of their school or
collegiate life and into the community. Students
who experience engaged learning in
contexts where they are expected to contribute,
and where their contributions are valued, tell
us of their greater satisfaction with their education,
their personal choices, and their futures.
The documentation of these outcomes
and their replicability are among the objectives
of the project’s research.
In fact, part of what the project hopes to
document is how findings confirm the now accepted (but, regrettably, less often practiced)
view that these are forms of learning
and pedagogies (in comparison to traditional
emphasis on lecturing as a means of information
transfer) that more effectively assure student
retention of what is learned and more
effectively aid student development of higher
critical skills of analysis and synthesis. To this
extent, the project will not only be documenting
the linkage of outcomes and core purposes
of liberal education; it will also be reinforcing
educational practices that are more effective
in realizing knowledge acquisition and intellectual
development. Engaged learning appears
to be the normative condition for multiple
types of development—cognitive, emotional,
moral, and civic. The project explores how
the commitment to understanding a topic with
significant connection beyond the learner,
obliging the learner to put her own views and
preconceptions in judgment, makes a positive
difference to students’ intellectual development,
to their sense of empowerment, and to
their civic lives.
The sources of the “hunch” the Bringing
Theory to Practice project was founded to explore
are hardly new. Aristotle and Dewey,
among many others, began with similar assumptions
about the links among the core
triad of educational purposes—the necessity
of the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of
self-realization, and the pursuit of justice. They
too believed that realizing these interrelated
purposes would result in particular forms of
moral development and social action. What
we would identify as liberal education was, on
the classical model, focused on a public community
purpose, namely good citizenship—
the understanding that individuals were
realized or actualized in the context of community.
And it was the Enlightenment that
encouraged the grounding of learning, knowledge,
and discovery in replication, evidence,
and the nonauthoritarian bases for any claims
to know. These historical strands became
linked elements in describing the sustaining
core purposes of liberal education. In translating
our hunch into a set of testable hypotheses,
we recognized that not all relationships
are causal, that discernible effects are distinguishable
from likely affects, and that the relationships
may be additive or even symbiotic.
Nonetheless, concrete evidence is needed to
substantiate the effects and affects of actualizing
the core purposes of liberal education. The
Bringing Theory to Practice project is supporting
ongoing research that seeks to document
outcomes and to justify the changes in
educational practices required to make engaged
learning normative.
The key role of faculty
Faculty are viewed by students as the primary
agents of transformation on campus, and they
are the group students respect the most. Thus,
faculty are perhaps the only group on campus
with the authority and the educational responsibility
to confront the proximate conditions
of self-indulgence and the withdrawal of
students from the challenges of engagement.
For this reason, the Bringing Theory to Practice
project is attempting to demonstrate that,
through their teaching and their expectations,
faculty can affect students’ choices and
behaviors, as well as students’ emotional and
civic development.
Faculty are not counselors or therapists.
Appropriately, they recognize that the provision of mental health services is
beyond their expertise. But
faculty are often aware of the
crises their students experience.
They are very likely
to notice when individual
students are incapacitated by
depression or abusive behaviors,
and they are concerned
about these problems. Most
faculty recognize that they
have considerable influence
on the choices and behaviors
of young adults, and most
want to help create positive
contexts for learning and for
student choices. If faculty do not actively
encourage the full integration of students’
lives, if they elect to address the issues through
grading alone and to relegate all other responsibilities
to student affairs staff, then the current
conditions of disengagement will continue
to prevail.
The Bringing Theory to Practice project
Developed jointly by the Charles Engelhard
Foundation and the Association of American
Colleges and Universities, the Bringing Theory
to Practice project was designed
to encourage colleges
and universities to revisit or
review the core purposes of
liberal education and to assess
their students’ achievement of
the full range of related outcomes.
Such an effort can reveal
the need for a significant
redirection of energies and resources
or for broad cultural
changes. Most significantly, it
can result in changed student
expectations.
In addition to providing
support for specific campus
programs, the project, now in its fourth year,
supports research on the connection of certain
forms of engaged learning to student
health and well-being, and to the complexity
and depth of students’ civic development. To
date, over two hundred colleges and universities
have been linked to aspects of the project,
and forty institutions have received grant
support for their programmatic or research
work. Project research is currently focused on
seven institutions that are serving as national
demonstration sites (see below).
Getting at purposes through an examination
of possible outcomes is a complex task; it is exceedingly
difficult to isolate the epistemic purpose
and to determine effectiveness in creating
and measuring learning outcomes. The Bringing
Theory to Practice project is focused on very
specific forms of pedagogy and learning that
already are important elements of many undergraduate
liberal education programs—namely,
service learning and community-based research.
These particular forms of engaged learning encourage
students to examine how concepts
translate into practice, how they expect and
value greater personal involvement from students,
and how they oblige students to link
action and understanding.
The project is currently studying the possible
effects and likely affects produced by engaged
learning experiences that are expected,
intensive, and valued elements of the undergraduate
experience. We are gathering evidence—
both testimonial and empirical—of
outcomes that link engaged learning to behavioral
choices and to student development.
And we are learning how faculty and administrators
who are involved across many campuses
can begin to structure a “learning community”
of their own affecting directional change at
their own institutions. The provisional evidence
supports the initial premise of the Bringing
Theory to Practice project: the core purposes
of liberal education can be realized through
particular forms of engaged learning that
affect the health, behaviors, and well-being
of students and foster civic responsibility.
Even as the research goes forward, the project
is encouraging campuses to continue, or
to initiate, conversations about the purposes
of liberal education and about the institutional
means available for achieving them.
This effective strategy already has led several
campuses to reexamine the extent to which
they are defining and actualizing their own
sense of quality, and the extent to which they
are pursuing services and activities that are
driven by perceived “market” demands. Additionally,
the project has supported the efforts
of individual campuses to better understand
the actual behaviors and patterns of experience
chosen by their specific populations of
students, and to assess those data within the
context of national studies.
The overarching aim of the Bringing Theory
to Practice project is to help colleges and
universities deliver on the full promise of a
quality undergraduate education by orienting
their campus practices to the achievement of
the three interrelated core purposes of liberal
education. The project encourages institutions
to create and support learning contexts that enable student transformation and, where
current practices do not succeed in creating
such contexts, the project argues for change.
In creating and sustaining contexts for engagement,
faculty must be supported, valued, and
rewarded for experimenting with new and
emerging pedagogies. This work is complex and
often difficult; however, faculty frequently find
such experimentation to be among the most intellectually,
emotionally, and morally satisfying
dimensions of teaching—especially when
they are supported culturally and institutionally.
The faculty members and professional
administrators involved in the project have
demonstrated their strong commitment to the
students on their own campuses. They have
been willing to act somewhat counter to prevailing
campus cultures by seriously considering
how the very heart of their institutions—the
faculty, dominant pedagogies, and the curriculum—
can positively and holistically affect the
lives of their students. Through their involvement
in the project, faculty and administrators
alike have found the reinforcing rationale and
evidence for strengthening the academic experience
in ways that more directly involve students,
that expect more from them, that take
them out of the classroom, and that involve
them in experiencing and understanding the
relation of what they study to issues and responsibilities
rooted outside of themselves.
Campus Demonstration Sites
The Bringing Theory to Practice project has
awarded grants to seven campus demonstration
sites. Each of these institutions is being funded
to develop and evaluate new strategies to get
students more engaged with their learning, and
in so doing, improve their health and civic
engagement.
Barnard College
Identity, Community and Belonging: Engaged Learning and Engaged Living for
Mental Health: A Demonstration Project
This project targets two groups of students who are often more vulnerable to the challenges of depression and disengagement: transfers and sophomores. It includes an academic seminar exploring the concepts of community, identity,
and belonging as well as three distinct civic engagement living/learning communities.
Dickinson College
Student Impact Assessment of Engaged Learning Initiatives
This multiyear study of the effects of student participation in an expanding learning communities program seeks to examine whether variously structured learning experiences—classroom-based, service learning, outdoor
experiential learning, and a non-credit learning community organized around community service—yield different impacts on student learning, mental health, and civic engagement.
Emory University
Sophomore Year at Emory Living and Learning Experience: An Interdisciplinary Seminar Course/Internship in Addiction and Depression
In order for students to appreciate the complexities of addiction and depression in the world and in their own lives, this model seminar course/internship experience in the new Second Year at Emory Residence Hall integrates several successful but so far distinct campus programs and uses problem- and research-based approaches grounded in the interdisciplinary context of the history, science, and impacts of these issues in society.
Georgetown University
Connecting the Safety Net to the Heart of the Academic Environment: Curriculum Infusion of Mental Health Issues into Lower- Division Courses
This project focuses on “curriculum infusion”—the blending of college health issues into the curriculum content of academic courses to positively affect student attitudes and behaviors. Bringing these important health issues into the academic environment enables them to be addressed with intellectual seriousness and free from the fear of social stigma in targeted curriculum modules across a wide spectrum of lower-division general education courses.
Morgan State University
SHARED (Students Helping and Receiving Educational Development) Experiences
This program expands Morgan State University students’ involvement in ongoing communitybased research and program development in
Southwest Baltimore and in the development and implementation of initiatives to promote student and community well-being and prevent substance use and depression.
St. Lawrence University
The St. Lawrence University Center for Civic Engagement and Leadership: Creating Opportunities for Agency and Intentionality in Student Learning Experiences
This intensive living–learning program employs the best practices of engaged learning pedagogies and assesses their impacts on civic engagement, depression, and alcohol abuse among students through primary data collection using multiple methods over a three-year period, coupled with secondary analysis of existing student databases.
Syracuse University
SAGE (Self-Assess, Grow, Educate) Options
Through rigorous evaluation, this project seeks to demonstrate the association between curricular and cocurricular student engagement as effective prevention strategies that address the roots of depression and substance abuse—indications of interpersonal and intrapersonal disengagement.
For more information, please visit the project Web site at www.aacu.org/bringing_theory.
Donald W. Harward, president emeritus of Bates College, is director of the Bringing Theory to Practice project.
References
Blum, R. W., and H. Libby. 2004. Executive summary. Journal of School Health 74 (7): 229–32.
Marano, H. 2004. A nation of wimps. Psychology Today 37 (6): 58–70.
Note
* In April 2005, the Bringing Theory to Practice project supported a major research study, completed by Lynn Swaner, that examines both the theoretical
levels and the available empirical research regarding the linkages among forms of engaged learning, forms of depression and substance abuse, and the civic development of students. An abridgment of the review is published in this issue of Liberal Education.
To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled@aacu.org, with the author's name on the subject line.
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