The Academy in Transition

Throughout its history, AAC&U has taken the lead in encouraging and facilitating dialogue on issues of importance to the higher education community. In 1998 AAC&U launched a new series of publications designed specifically to generate dialogue among faculty members and academic leaders about key issues in undergraduate education. The purposes of the series are to analyze changes taking place in undergraduate education and to provide "road maps" about the directions and destinations of the changing academy.

In 2001 AAC&U also introduced into the series publications addressing key policy and research issues of importance to undergraduate education. Collectively, the publications in this series all point to a more purposeful, robust, and efficient academy that is in the process of being created. It is designed for those leaders and practitioners at the center of this change process and at all kinds of colleges and universities.

The series includes:

A Brief History of Student Learning Assessment: How We Got Where We Are and a Proposal for Where to Go Next
Richard J. Shavelson, with a forward by Carol Geary Schneider and Lee S. Shulman
A Brief History of Student Learning Assessment offers an historical overview of testing in higher education and a proposal for a more productive approach to student learning assessment in the future. It provides an important context for today's renewed calls for greater accountability and, more importantly, the urgent need to raise levels of student achievement. It helps us better understand the "state-of-the-art" in standardized testing today, and what the academy should ask, and what it can and cannot expect, from standardized testing in the future. (2007/48pp)

Integrative Learning: Mapping the Terrain
Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings
This paper explores the challenges to integrative learning today as well as its longer tradition and rationale within a vision of liberal education. In outlining promising directions for campus work, the authors draw on AAC&U's landmark report Greater Expectations as well as the Carnegie Foundation's long-standing initiative on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Readers will find a map of the terrain of integrative learning on which promising new developments in undergraduate education can be cultivated, learned from, and built upon. (2005/18pp)

General Education and the Assessment Reform Agenda
Peter Ewell
This paper reflects on the challenges of general education and assessment reform in the context of recent calls for accountability in higher education. The author argues that by focusing on abilities, alignment, assessment, and action, campuses can both improve general education programs and demonstrate student achievement of learning outcomes key to success in the 21st century. This book is ideal for general education or curricular reform committees and campus discussions about assessment, general education, and accountability. (2004/21pp)

The Living Arts: Comparative and Historical Reflections on Liberal Education
Sheldon Rothblatt
Written by a leading historian of higher education, this analysis of liberal education examines major themes in the tradition, considers its standing in both Europe and the United States, and proposes ways of reinvigorating liberal learning in American education. (2003/84pp)

College Level Learning in High School: Purposes, Policies, and Practical Implications
D. Bruce Johnstone and Beth Del Genio
This report examines college-level learning in high school and related issues such as high school curriculum and standards, college access and equity, faculty jobs and curricular authority, and relations between two-year and four-year colleges. It examines the central role of college and university policies and practices, both toward the sponsorship of college-level learning in high school and toward the acceptance of college-level credits and presents new research finding on academic leaders' attitudes toward college-level learning in high school. (2001/80pp)

General Education in an Age of Student Mobility: An Invitation to Discuss Systemic Curricular Planning
Considers the challenge of designing a coherent curriculum for an increasingly mobile student population. Asks how the integrity of individual general education programs can be maintained in the face of public pressures to simplify transfer. Might colleges and universities assess students on the basis of specific learning outcomes, or will they continue to regard a random collection of credit hours as though it amounted to a meaningful education? (2001/38pp)

General Education: The Changing Agenda
Jerry G. Gaff
An analysis of the changes in general education over the last two decades, since the reform of general education broke onto the scene in the late 1970s. Also focuses on several new challenges facing curriculum reformers today. (1999/20pp)

Globalizing Knowledge: Connecting International and Intercultural Studies
Grant Cornwell and Eve Stoddard
In recent decades, we have had separate movements to reform curricula both by "internationalizing" them and by recognizing the diversity that characterizes the United States. But on most campuses, the study of the rest of the world and the study of "America" have developed in almost complete independence of each other. This paper argues that these movements are concerned with many of the same issues, and it makes a strong case for their intersection in our goals for student learning and programs. (1999/42pp)

Mapping Interdisciplinary Studies
Julie Thompson Klein
Provides an overview of trends in disciplinary change, interdisciplinary fields, and general education and discusses why interdisciplinarity is taking hold in the academy today. Also presents talking points for dialogue on the topics of integrating curriculum, integrative process and pedagogies, assessment, faculty development, institutional change, and support strategies. (1999/28pp)

Contemporary Understandings of Liberal Education
Carol Geary Schneider and Robert Shoenberg
Drawing on a survey of over 500 curriculum initiatives, the authors examine the emergence of broad agreement on what students ought to learn from a liberal education and find a strong trend toward pluralistic, collaborative, experiential, and integrative modes of learning. But they also contend that outdated structures, practices, and reward systems frustrate higher education's ability to reap the benefits of new directions in student learning. (1998/28pp)