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Peer Review, Spring 2004
Changing Practices in Liberal Education: What
Future Faculty Need to Know
By Carol Geary Schneider, president, AAC&U |
Liberal education has been this nation's signature
educational philosophy since the founding. It has altered dramatically
both in its subject matter and in its practices
over the centuries, but through all the changes, it has held
pride of place in the academy in part because of its inspiring
aims (see editor's introduction) and in part because
of
its capacity to adapt to a changing world.
Today, liberal education is again engaged in one of those
transitional periods that historically have resulted in far-reaching
and transformative educational change. Transformative change
is not always positive, and the outcome for liberal education
in the present era is far from certain. But whether positive
or negative, widespread changes in educational practice will
assuredly have far reaching implications for the disciplines
that have been central to liberal education in the twentieth-century
academy and for the faculty who teach them. For this reason
alone, those charged with stewardship of the disciplines need
to look beyond their fields to the larger educational landscape
and address contemporary trends and contests a round undergraduate
education.
It is widely understood that a generational shift is underway
on our campuses as a large cohort of senior faculty moves
into retirement and new faculty arrive to take their places.
It has not been noted, however, that these new faculty members
are entering their careers at a pivotal moment in the history
of American higher education and in the social history of
liberal education. If this new generation of faculty members--future
faculty still in graduate school and new faculty still in
the early years of their careers--will seize the opportunity
presented by this transitional era and make a real commitment
to the reinvigoration of the undergraduate experience, they
can collectively seed a new flowering of liberal education.
With an ever- increasing percentage of the population now
heading to college, the result could be extraordinary, both
for our graduates and, through the quality of their learning,
for our society.
But if this new generation does not take up the challenge
of educational renewal, we may find, a few decades hence,
that the current era of far-reaching change has been primarily
destructive, leading to the permanent marginalization of the
liberal education tradition--and many of the disciplines associated
with it--in all but a small set of colleges and universities.
Both prospects are already fully in view.
Liberal Education in Transition:
Which Road to the Future?
Tens of thousands of college and university faculty members
across the country--in every discipline--already are engaged
in widespread curricular and pedagogical innovations that,
collectively, have the potential to produce that twenty-first
century flowering of liberal education. AAC&U and The
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching--the cosponsors
of this issue of Peer Review-- have joined forces in our enthusiasm
for the educational possibilities that these teacher/scholars
are creating, and in our shared determination both to foster
and to champion a more engaged, integrative, and socially
responsible approach to liberal education. Our common purpose
is to provide the advantages of a rigorous, public spirited,
and intellectually challenging liberal education to all college
students.
At the same time, we also see widespread resistance to the
very idea of liberal education--by policy makers, by the public,
and by many students. Many of those in a position to make
decisions about the future and the funding of higher education
honestly believe that liberal education is a luxury rather
than a necessity, and that the right educational focus--for
most students and most of the academy--is career training
and workforce development.
Those who have benefited from liberal education understand
immediately the fallacy in this dismissal. In our knowledge-driven
economy, every participant in the workforce will most
certainly need the intellectual skills and big-picture understandings
fostered by a strong liberal education. Our democracy
also depends on citizens' knowledgeable judgment, on their
orientation to continuous learning, and on their sense of
social responsibility.
But merely saying that liberal education is valuable, or
that the disciplines have a role in its achievement, is no
longer sufficient to carry the day. The twentieth-century
academy did not do a good job of helping the public understand
what a liberal education is all about. Nor was it particularly
interested in providing evidence to the public about its benefits.
To often, we insisted that liberal education was valuable
for its own sake, with the result that neither the public
nor, in many instances, our own graduates could explain how
liberal education mattered in the world at large.
Compounding the challenge, many of the standard practices
developed in the twentieth century have themselves proved
an impediment to achieving the larger aims of liberal education.
The extreme atomization of the contemporary college curriculum,
the Chinese menu designs for course selection both in general
education and in the major, and the continuing dominance of
the lecture have shifted the burden of intellectual coherence
and integration to students themselves. Some students rise
impressively to this challenge, but many do not. For a significant
fraction of our students, course-taking in the art s and sciences
has been an experience of fragmentation rather than integration.
The current landscape, in short, is one of great opportunity
and of daunting obstacles. The opportunity emerges from the
new significance of higher learning for both the economy and
democratic vitality, and from the creativity and commitment
of faculty members who already are creating new practices
better suited to the needs of today's students.
But the obstacles--external and internal--are also very real.
Future faculty members will not overcome them through solid
scholarship alone, or even by teaching with creativity and
passion. If liberal education is to survive this transitional
period, future faculty will need to leave graduate school
with a clear understanding of the larger educational enterprise:
its aims, its organizing principles, its curricular pathways.
They will need to know how their individual disciplines and
courses contribute to the larger ends of education, and they
will have to help invent better ways of ensuring and documenting
that students have actually achieved what is expected of them
educationally, across their entire course of undergraduate
study.
The Disciplines and the Unraveling
of Breadth and Depth"
For most of the twentieth century, both the disciplines and
the academy's commitment to liberal or liberal arts education
were ascendant, and most proponents of liberal education assumed,
axiomatically, that the intellectual powers cultivated through
study in a discipline provided the surest foundation for personal,
civic, and professional life.
Over the first few decades of the twentieth century, the
newly dominant disciplines fundamentally reorganized the shape
and content of the undergraduate curriculum. The old classical
curriculum fell away, and so too did the concept of the curriculum
as a common program of study. By mid century, virtually the
entire academy had adopted the view--unknown in earlier eras--that
the best design for liberal education was one of " breadth"
and "depth." In this design, " breadth" meant general education
courses in a range of disciplines to provide a bro a d understanding
of science, culture, and society, while "depth" meant focused
study within the boundaries of a particular discipline.
Today, this twentieth-century design for liberal education
is visibly unraveling, pulled asunder by the combined force
of several centrifugal trends. The first trend is the relative
decline of the disciplinary major both as a focal point for
the undergraduate curriculum and as the centerpiece both of
liberal education and "study in depth." A 2001 study by the
Carnegie Corporation of New York found that 60 percent of
recent college graduates had majored in a professional field,
rather than one of the liberal arts and sciences disciplines.
This study looked only at the bachelor's degree, however.
Once we take into account the fact that half of today's students
enroll in community colleges and that the great majority of
these students focus on "applied" or "career" fields (often
studying subjects that do not transfer to four- year schools),
the liberal arts and sciences major looms even smaller on
the academic horizon.
Further pressure on the disciplinary major comes from scholarship
itself and from the emergence of interdisciplinary topics
and fields as a new focus, not just for research but for the
curriculum. Interdisciplinarity is springing up both within
and across the traditional arts and sciences boundaries. Meanwhile,
students themselves are adding further to the multidisciplinary
complexity as they increasingly choose two or even three separate
majors (often crossing "liberal art s " and "professional"
lines).
A second trend is the extreme fragmentation of students'
actual curricular experiences, especially in general education.
This fragmentation is particularly troubling at campuses where
most students major in professional fields and where liberal
education is fostered almost exclusively through general or
distribution requirements in arts and sciences disciplines.
Where higher education once considered general education in
the first and second year to be the "core" of a liberal education
and a foundation for study in depth, many campuses now find
that the students who took their "core" have transferred or
dropped out, while their actual graduates have imported their
general education courses from somewhere else. With the majority
of college students now attending two or more campuses on
their way to a degree, this trend toward a shopping cart experience
of general education --and de facto, of liberal education--is
likely to accelerate.
Simultaneously, there has been a marked increase in college-level
course taking in high school; many college students can now
meet several general education requirements with advanced
placement and/or "dual-enrollment " courses. Especially at
campuses where liberal education and general education have
become essentially the same thing, this trend also contributes
to the marginalization of liberal education and of liberal
arts and sciences disciplines by turning them into high school
work.
Finally, the competing pressures for students' time have
further fragmented the traditional "breadth/depth" design
for liberal education. With many students not only working
but also managing families and off -campus homes, part-time
study is becoming more and more common. Students with limited
resources and heavy work schedules are especially vulnerable
here; they may choose their courses primarily to meet scheduling
pressures, only to discover that the result is a smorgasbord
of disconnected studies, rather than a coherent progression
toward intellectual breadth and depth.
New Academy Designs for Liberal
Education
In sum, the twentieth-century design for liberal education
is in disarray. But hope is on the horizon; the nation's campuses
are crackling with a broad array of curricular and pedagogical
innovations. In the aggregate, these innovations point the
way toward a new approach to liberal education that is better
attuned both to today's students and to a world in which complexity
and change are the new constants.
AAC&U has termed these innovations a "New Academy" springing
up on the boundaries, and increasingly within the departments,
of the established academy. This New Academy features "aims
across the curriculum," more active connections with the community,
intercultural and collaborative problem solving, and a new
focus on helping students integrate the disparate parts of
their learning.
It is too soon to say that we are about to replace "breadth
and depth" with an alternative set of organizing principles.
But it is certainly the case that there are already many experiments
"across the curriculum" that, if aligned, could create a far
more purposeful and powerful cornerstone-to-capstone design
for liberal education.
Like the old "breadth/depth" model that rose to challenge
the classical curriculum a century ago, these "New Academy"
innovations are emerging as the collective product of many
different reform agendas. But this time, the reforms are driven
not by the need to create departmental homes for research
disciplines but, rather, by faculty members' strong interest
in helping students to develop the skills and judgment they
need for a complex world and to connect their learning with
the needs of the larger society.
If we compare the typology of the New Academy with the older
designs for "breadth and depth," three themes stand out:
A new focus on inquiry skills and intellectual judgment.
The New Academy is strongly concerned not just with what
students "know"--the implicit agenda in the era of "breadth
and depth"--but also with what they are prepared to do
with their knowledge.
A renewed concern with social responsibility
and civic engagement. The New Academy is increasingly
concerned with students' preparation and disposition to connect
their learning with issues beyond the academy and to take
an active role, both as citizens and as professionals, in
a diverse, contested, and global community.
A new interest in integrative learning.
The New Academy is taking seriously the fragmentation of knowledge,
not just in our courses, but through the knowledge explosion
in the world around us. Many of the most interesting educational
innovations clearly are intended to teach students what we
might call the new liberal art of integration. Not only do
these innovations invite students to integrate learning from
different sources, but they also provide models, frameworks,
and practice in actually doing so.
The Implications for Graduate
Preparation
If these are the promising frontiers for the renewal of liberal
education, how might graduate education prepare students to
engage and advance them? Here, to launch the discussion, are
some suggestions:
Address directly the aims and practices of liberal
education. At the level of the graduate school, and
in cooperation with undergraduate colleges and institutions,
offer courses that introduce graduate students to the academic
landscape and include a major unit on liberal education as
a framework for the undergraduate experience. Examine some
of the major reform agendas as new frontiers in the unfinished
history of liberal education. Include experiential as well
as academic learning about these movements.
Teach the teaching
of intellectual skills, argument, and judgment. At the level
of the graduate department, provide workshops and apprenticeships
that help graduate students probe the analytical and inquiry
practices of their discipline, and the ways in which the discipline
helps novices gain proficiency in those tools. What counts
as a good problem in this field, and how would a novice come
to understand those expectations? What are the analytical,
communication, and research methods of the discipline?
How should undergraduate students be introduced both to the
methods and to the contests about them? How should the methods
of the field be framed in introductory, intermediate, and
advanced courses and projects?
Create a citizen's perspective on the work of the
discipline. At the level of the graduate department,
explore with graduate students the societal and civic questions
that a re important to this field. Civic and ethical discussions
might begin with the question, What is happening in this field
that matters to our society? What are our obligations-- professional,
civic, and ethical--to society? How do we address such issues
in the context of our teaching? How do we create spaces for
nonspecialists to engage our work? In what ways do we include
the public in the shaping of our work? How do we serve the
public good?
Create opportunities for graduate students to examine
the undergraduate experience as a whole. Many graduate
universities and departments already have created partnerships
with neighboring colleges and universities through the Preparing
Future Faculty initiative. These partnerships provide opportunities
for future faculty to "try on" the many roles, beyond scholarly
research, that faculty members actually play--as teachers,
as academic citizens, and as advisors. Many departments are
now testing more ambitious designs. As they do so, here are
some questions to ask: What systemic changes are our partner
schools (and our own undergraduate colleges) attempting to
make in the undergraduate experience? What could graduate
students learn from a comparative study of different reform agendas at different kinds of colleges and universities
across the country? Could new forums be created to help future faculty prepare to take leadership roles in the
most promising reinventions of undergraduate education?
Few graduate students have opportunities to engage such
questions in any systematic or guided way. But with the future
of liberal education very much on the line, surely it is time
for future faculty (and experienced faculty as well) to do
so. This will be an era of fundamental questions about the
way our fields do--and should--contribute to the integrity
of each student's liberal education. Responsible stewardship
for our fields implies that we will be prepared to answer.
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