The first publication in AAC&U's series exploring "The Academy in Transition" is Contemporary Understandings of
Liberal Education.
Framed as a stimulus to campus discussion, the paper maps national trends in educational reform and examines their
implications for the content and organization of higher learning.
The Association of American Colleges and Universities encourages faculty members and academic leaders to use this
paper as a point of departure for their own analysis of the direction of educational change. We hope the authors'
arguments will inspire faculty members and academic leaders to think broadly and creatively about the educational
communities we inherit—and about the educational communities we want to create.
It is no secret that American higher education is in a period of transformative change. More than at any other time
in the memory of the senior members of the academy, colleges and universities seem bent on finding and learning new
ways of doing their work. Motivated by a familiar list of external forces ranging from public questioning of their priorities
to financing to technology, institutional leaders are scrambling to rethink their methods while remaining true to their
purposes.
The shift from a teaching to a learning paradigm of instruction, the incorporation of information technology and
all it makes possible into the fabric of the institution, the increasing engagement with the local and global community,
the new awareness of an assertive and rapidly expanding for-profit higher education sector and the reconsideration
of such issues as tenure collectively exemplify the quite profound transformations now in process. We are indeed in
the midst of a time of great change.
These changes do not affect all institutions and all individuals in the same way. Public institutions experience
them differently from private ones, liberal arts colleges differently from research universities, community colleges
differently from baccalaureate institutions, selective institutions differently from those with open admissions.
Similarly, teachers across the forty-year age span of most faculties exhibit generational differences in their sense
of the desirability and urgency of change, differences influenced by their academic training, their expectations when
they decided on a life in academe, and their career experiences.
The much-admired diversity of American higher education is here reflected in a multitude of different responses
to a world changing in ways both clear and unforeseeable.
A time of stabilization within a new, widely acknowledged general pattern may come, but we have not yet reached that
point of equilibrium. Indeed, the world of higher education has only recently reached a broadly shared understanding
that it is in a transformational period.
This experience of dislocation is intensified by dawning campus recognition that public perceptions of higher education
are frequently discordant with the academy's own sense of fundamental missions. Public criticism of such matters as
higher education pricing policies, credit transfer practices, and the ways in which faculty spend their time is often
incongruent with campus leaders' perceptions of their institutional commitments and responsibilities. The widespread
student, parent and general public assumption that higher education is and should be primarily vocational collides
with faculty members' insistence that intellectual development, preparation for citizenship and moral growth are at
the least an equally important part of their educational purposes. This same public orientation also manifests itself
in pervasive devaluation of research missions and endeavors. With rare exception, members of the public and higher
education leaders, while sharing a well-founded faith in the value of education, have not found a way of mediating
their quite different understandings of what that value is or should be.
A recent cartoon shows a herd of steers dashing chaotically over the plains, each headed in a somewhat different
direction. One of the steers complains to another, "I hate badly organized stampedes." And that is what the current
circumstances of higher education can feel like: a badly organized stampede.
Yet for all the sense of dislocation and disruption, there are emerging understandings and practices that can point
the academy in a definable and educationally productive direction. For more than a decade, a growing number of colleges
and universities have been engaged in an important, but largely unremarked, reexamination of their educational purposes
and practices. Much of this rethinking has taken the form of extensive changes in general education programs and graduation
requirements. Some of it emerges from campus-wide restructuring of major programs and the development of new fields
and related programs of study. A further spur to educational change has been the widespread focus on student diversity
and a deepening campus engagement with effective ways of supporting student persistence and achievement. Assessment
mandates also have contributed to reconsideration of the goals and efficacy of baccalaureate learning.
Taken together, the themes emerging across hundreds of campuses and thousands of separate educational reforms express
a renewed and contemporary understanding of the kinds of learning students need to negotiate a rapidly transforming
world. Our purpose here is to illuminate this emerging understanding and propose ways of developing its full educational
potential for the academy in transition.
The first part of this paper draws primarily on the Association of American Colleges and Universities' extensive
involvement over the past decade with several hundred campus-based teaching and learning initiatives. (1) Here we point to major themes in campus-based educational change—themes that collectively
define a new intentionality about what and how students learn.
In the middle section of the paper, we turn our attention to well-entrenched practices and structures that, in the
authors' judgment, largely work against the quality of learning new campus initiatives seek to effect. This part of
the paper, evaluative rather than empirical, suggests habits the academy will need to break before it can fully realize
a viable and sustainable direction for undergraduate learning in the decades ahead.
In the final section, we propose ways of rethinking and reframing the educational architecture of the undergraduate
experience that take account of the educational innovations and aspirations increasingly visible throughout higher
education.
Since teaching and learning are at the heart of the academic enterprise, we begin our discussion there. Curriculum
and instruction have been for more than a decade the major locus of contention about the educational purpose and practice
of colleges and universities, both intramurally and extramurally. The issues range from the "culture wars" to the
purposes and values of the liberal arts, from the degree of concern for the quality of student learning to the assessment
of learning outcomes, from the role of electronic technology in instruction to the value of bringing students into
direct engagement with neighboring and global communities.
In both anticipating and responding to these challenges, college and university faculty members have tried much that
is genuinely new, or newly emphasized and freshly conceived. The computer has wrought enormous changes in the way
faculty teach (not to mention how they carry on their research), in how they interact with students, and even in the
constituencies they now reach. If nothing else new were happening, information technology would by itself revolutionize
the academy. In particular, it has fueled a profound change in thinking about instruction from teacher-centered to
learner-centered education. (2)
But much else has been introduced and become significant in shaping new directions: curricular, particularly general
education models that are conceived in terms of development of intellectual skills as opposed to encountering particular
subject matter; new emphases on engaging the diversity of human communities and global cultures; the radiation of
experiential learning and its close congener, service learning; cooperative and collaborative learning; interdisciplinarity;
topically linked courses or "learning communities"; undergraduate research; discovery approaches to science, just
to name a few. (3) New and insistent demands from the public and from accrediting
agencies that institutions clarify and specify their goals and demonstrate their achievement of them are in turn having
an increasingly visible, if still uneven, effect on educational practice.
An Emerging Conceptualization of Liberal Learning
From this wealth of new programs and practices, a pattern is emerging that shows promise of providing a conceptual
framework for undergraduate learning which is both contemporary and within the traditions of the academy.
This conceptualization responds to the reality of a changing and knowledge-intensive society. But it also draws
directly on those traditions of excellence the academy has long described as "liberal learning," ways of approaching
knowledge that expand imaginative horizons, develop intellectual powers and judgment, and instill in students the
capacity and resolve to exercise leadership and responsibility in multiple spheres of life, both societal and vocational.
(4)
This conceptualization further includes new ways of talking about the content of a liberal education and new approaches
to teaching and learning. Indeed, the language many campuses are using to describe the content of a contemporary liberal
education implies the necessity for emphasizing some learning strategies and reducing the prevalence of others.
Although each institution organizes its educational program in its own way, the following seems a fair description
of the learning goals implicit in contemporary campus efforts to reconceive both their degree requirements and their
undergraduate curricula:
ACQUIRING INTELLECTUAL SKILLS OR CAPACITIES
Almost universally, institutions include writing and quantitative reasoning in their requirements. Achievement
of a certain level of proficiency in oral expression, computer use and a second language are often expected. In
more and more colleges and universities, students are also expected to develop skill in moral reasoning and negotiating
difference.
UNDERSTANDING MULTIPLE MODES OF INQUIRY AND APPROACHES TO KNOWLEDGE
This is the emergent way of talking about the "distribution requirements" that for much of the twentieth century
dominated—and in many institutions still do dominate—general education programs. The commonly encountered
requirement that students have some exposure to the knowledge content of the sciences, social sciences, humanities
and (less frequently) the arts is being re-justified in epistemological terms. Imparting a sense of the analytic
modes of these broad areas of intellectual endeavor forms the rationale for "distribution," and the way in which
courses that meet these requirements are taught is being adjusted accordingly. This impetus informs contemporary
curricular innovations in science, where "workshop," "studio," and other hands-on approaches are being widely introduced.
DEVELOPING SOCIETAL, CIVIC, AND GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE
Traditionally, history and "Western Civilization" requirements have been based on the premise that educated people
should know something about societies and events remote in time, but which help to explain contemporary society.
The academy is now adding the further expectation that students will learn about cultures separated from the
dominant culture by distance and/or by assumptions, experiences, or differential social power. With rapidly increasing
frequency, general education requirements include study of a non-European culture and of contemporary cultural
diversity (i.e., gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.) and justice issues, both in the United States
and abroad. Many campuses promote service learning programs explicitly designed to involve students with challenging
societal issues. Through projects to increase student study abroad, colleges and universities are developing more
accessible and more diverse ways to support global knowledge and cross-cultural competence.
GAINING SELF KNOWLEDGE AND GROUNDED VALUES
This learning goal is seldom manifested in specific degree requirements but underlies, as implicitly it always
has, undergraduate education in general and the general education curriculum in particular. Good teaching, now as
ever, tries to help students place and define themselves within their particular cultures and the broader society
and to do so within expanding frameworks of knowledge, self-awareness, and increased capacity for reflective judgment.
New courses and programs frequently invite students to reflect on their own sources of identity and values and to
engage with challenging ethical, moral, and human dilemmas. Fostering social and civic responsibility is an avowed
goal of many new curricula. New self-consciousness about heterogeneity on campus and in society is accelerating
many of these trends toward clarifying and exploring value choices and positions.
CONCENTRATION AND INTEGRATION OF LEARNING
With rare exception, students are expected to spend anywhere from a quarter to three-quarters of their academic
time developing working knowledge and demonstrable skills in a particular field of inquiry and/or practice. The
academic major remains the focus of undergraduate education, the curricular element by which students most often
and readily define themselves within the institution and through which they explore life and vocational choices
and possibilities.
Increasingly, however, the boundaries between general education and the major are becoming blurred. Some institutions
are acting on their realization that the broad and ambitious goals of general education cannot be met within a
small set of discrete courses and are asking both the majors and the co-curriculum to take on some of those responsibilities.
At many other institutions, upper level integrative general education courses are taught in ways that intersect
and enrich the advanced learning in the major. The rapid growth of interdisciplinary majors and minors accelerates
this integrative trend.
The dominant mode for achieving these learning goals remains lecture and small(er) group discussion, as it has for
the last century. Belief in instructor personality, in the professor's ability to induce student commitment to the
intellectual content of the course and in his or her skill as an explicator and motivator still governs our practice.
But presentational teaching as the quintessential activity of the college professor is retreating before a growing
emphasis on the centrality of the student as learner. (5) In this newer conception,
the instructor's role as motivator remains fundamental, but now as a mentor in acquiring strategies for learning.
As the familiar formulation puts it, the professor is no longer primarily "the sage on the stage," but assumes a new
and crucial role as "the guide on the side."
This emerging understanding of the multiple purposes of collegiate instruction is both accompanied and advanced
by a raft of increasingly emphasized or newly developed ways of learning. Computer technology, with its capacities
for calculation, simulation, and facilitating communication both in real time and at the convenience of the correspondents,
has changed teaching forever. Providing new forms of learning and new access to information, information technology
is forcefully challenging the model of a single knowledgeable person talking to, or controlling interaction among,
a group of people assembled in one place at the same time. New instructional technologies facilitate one-on-one interaction
and allow students to do much more on their own, individually, or in groups, with professor-created, problem-focused,
often computer-mediated materials to provide guidance and correction.
None of these developments invalidates the importance of the instructor's greater knowledge and wisdom as a powerful
resource for students' learning. Nor do they eliminate the significance of the group setting as a stimulus to intellectual
development and understanding. Rather, these key elements in the learning process are being reconfigured through an
increasing emphasis on involving students earlier and more frequently in hands-on, inquiry-oriented strategies for
learning:
COLLABORATIVE INQUIRY: LEARNING AND PROBLEM-SOLVING IN GROUP SETTINGS, BOTH DIRECT AND ON-LINE
Students work as a team, both in the classroom and outside it, with the instructor as coach.
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING: DIRECT EXPERIENCE IN FIELD SETTINGS, WITH OPEN-ENDED PROBLEMS, PROJECTS, AND CHALLENGES
The instructor helps the students, either individually or as a group, learn to process their experience, put
it in a context of general principle--practical, intellectual and ethical--and rethink theories in light of the
field experience.
SERVICE LEARNING: DIRECT EXPERIENCES WITH SOCIETAL ISSUES AND WITH GROUPS SEEKING TO SOLVE PROBLEMS AND
IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF LIFE FOR THEMSELVES AND OTHERS
Again, the instructor's role is to provide social, moral,and technical context and to help students generalize
from the particular, connect scholarship with practice, and discover grounds for commitment and action.
RESEARCH OR INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING: HELPING STUDENTS DEVELOP COMPETENCE IN ACHIEVING THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE
OF COLLEGIATE EDUCATION—ORGANIZING AND DEALING WITH UNSTRUCTURED PROBLEMS
Often making use of educational technologies, students experience the excitement and the usefulness of creating
new knowledge. The instructor serves as guide and mentor, but in many cases is not the expert. This role is shifted
to the student.
INTEGRATIVE LEARNING: GENERATING LINKS AMONG PREVIOUSLY UNCONNECTED ISSUES, APPROACHES, SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE,
AND/OR CONTEXTS FOR PRACTICE.
Such learning is often multidisciplinary. Increasingly, it occurs in the context of learning communities or thematically
linked courses. The instructor serves as exemplar of the person whose role is to find fresh and instructive connections,
helping students learn how to test the intellectual and practical usefulness—the explanatory power—of
the connections they find. Faculty members teaching linked courses work together to design curricular frameworks
and materials that facilitate integrative inquiry and learning.
If we bracket for a moment the transformative power of the new technologies, none of these pedagogies is absolutely
new. Some of them draw from the well-established model of the laboratory scientist working in close partnership with
apprentice learners. Others have for decades been pedagogies of choice at campuses with high intellectual standards
and low student-faculty ratios.
What is arresting, rather, is the new emphasis, visible at every kind of institution, on extending to a broad array
of students the modes of mentored, engaged, and problem-focused learning that were once reserved for an elite. Equally
arresting is the increasing use of educational technologies to frame and reinforce inquiry-based and often collaborative
strategies for learning.
The new pedagogical emphases provide a particularly strong match for the emerging curriculum's thrust toward interconnection
and relationship. Faculty members are actively encouraging students to develop operational knowledge of their learning,
experiences, and aspirations as they stand in juxtaposition with other knowers. The capacity to engage other knowers
is implicitly defined in such curricular themes as communication, epistemologies, cultures, historical time, place,
values, and the development of collaborative expertise.
Taken together, both the contemporary goals for student learning described above and these pedagogies of engagement
express faculty members' expectation that students will emerge from their educational experience with what Elizabeth
Minnich has termed "liberal arts of translation," the abilities, commitments, and knowledge required to move productively
among diverse subjects, contexts, communities, cultures, and nations. (6)
The newly emphasized learning modes encourage students to develop capacities to deal with challenging differences.
The ability to negotiate multiple forms of diversity is fostered through:
collaborative work in which students gain an appreciation for the differing and complementary strengths that diverse
individuals bring to a group;
multidisciplinary and integrative learning designed to create an awareness of relationships, tensions, and complementarities
among ideas and epistemologies;
experiential learning and service/learning that create a lively sense of students' own life experiences and those
of others;
international study and foreign language learning whose resurgence in new forms and with new methods responds
to increasingly urgent needs to communicate across cultures;
collaborative projects in which students work in diverse teams to frame, address, and propose solutions to significant
problems.
We might characterize this emerging reconceptualization of curriculum and pedagogy as a movement toward "relational
learning." (7) Faculties, like the society as a whole, have been called to awareness
of societal diversities by insistent voices both within and outside the academy. They are struggling to deal responsibly
with the intellectual, social, and political implications of this newly acknowledged societal pluralism, both at home
and abroad. Colleges and universities are bringing these concerns into the curriculum not simply in terms of individual
course content, but in the ways they conceptualize the purposes of education and the pedagogical strategies they employ.
(8)
Fifty years ago the Harvard "Red Book" posited a curriculum focused on a unified national culture based in Western
thought. By contrast, the emerging curriculum assumes a world society characterized by a multitude of life experiences
and informed by complex intersections among historical experiences, gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status,
sexual orientation, religious values, political assumptions, cultural styles, and so on. The liberally educated person,
many now argue, needs not only substantial knowledge but also the skills and awareness to negotiate what philosopher
Maxine Greene has called "a world lived in common with others." (9)
Thus colleges and universities must educate not in terms of mind alone but also in terms of a life lived in relationships
with others whose experiences and assumptions may be very different. Faculties are therefore beginning to pay increased
attention to the "civic arts" that lead to an understanding of diversity and to skill in negotiating difficult differences
and building communities that respect and acknowledge difference. They are more insistently involving students in
an engagement with diversity and equity issues both at home and abroad and in learning experiences that help students
develop these capacities and understandings in morally honest and dialogical ways.
(1) The authors have worked directly with numerous campus-based initiatives sponsored by the Association
of American Colleges and Universities to improve educational practice, including projects on renewing general education,
re-forming and assessing college majors, incorporating global and United States diversity into the curriculum, and
efforts to "teach science as science is done." Each also has served as a consultant to a long list of individual institutions
engaged in rethinking graduation standards and changing general education programs. Robert Shoenberg has worked also
with several educational initiatives sponsored by the American Council on Education. He has further served as an evaluator
for the National Endowment for the Humanities of new core curricula and as a consultant to the United States Department
of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. This article therefore represents an analysis of
the direction of change at several hundred separate colleges and universities, representing every category in the
standard Carnegie classifications. back to text
(2) The locus classicus of this reconceptualization is Robert B. Barr and John Tagg, "From
Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education," Change (November-December, 1995): 13-25.
back to text
(3) A comprehensive overview of contemporary curricular themes and innovations is provided in Handbook
of the Undergraduate Curriculum: A Comprehensive Guide to Purposes, Structure, Practices, and Change, ed. Jerry
G. Gaff, James L. Ratcliff, and Associates. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997. Additional information on
general education reform can be found in Strong Foundations: Twelve Principles for Effective General Education
Programs, Participants in the Project on Strong Foundations for General Education. (Washington, DC: The Association
of American Colleges, 1994). back to text
(4) A window into shifting understandings of liberal education is provided in Education and Democracy:
Re-imagining Liberal Learning in America, ed. Robert Orrill. (New York: The College Examination Board, 1997).
See also: Frank Wong, "The Search for American Liberal Education." Rethinking Liberal Education. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996) and Bruce Kimball, A History of the Idea of Liberal Education. (New York: Teachers
College Press, 1986). back to text
(5) Research on higher education curriculum and pedagogy almost uniformly suggests that colleges
and universities generally fail to achieve their broadly stated goals and that our most common lecture-discussion
teaching methods produce disappointing results in student learning. An excellent summary of this research and the
conclusions to be drawn from it may be found in Lion F. Gardiner, Redesigning Higher Education: Producing Dramatic
Gains in Student Learning. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report. (Washington, DC: The George Washington University,
Graduate School of Education and Human Development, 23:7). back to text
(6) Elizabeth Minnich, Liberal Learning and the Arts of Connection for the New Academy. (Washington,
DC: The Association of American Colleges and Universities, 1995). This report was written for AAC&U's national initiative
American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy and Liberal Learning. back to text
(7) The concept of "relational learning" emerged through dialogue among members of the National
Panel advising AAC&U's American Commitments initiative. It is explored at greater length by Lee Knefelkamp and Carol
Schneider in "Education for a World Lived in Common with Others" in Orrill, ed., op. cit., pp. 327-344. back
to text
(8) Numerous examples of new core curricula and general education courses emphasizing cultural pluralism
at home and abroad are provided in Betty Schmitz, Core Curriculum and Cultural Pluralism: A Guide for Campus Planners.
(Washington, DC: The Association of American Colleges, 1992) and in Debra Humphreys, General Education and American
Commitments: A National Report on Diversity Courses and Requirements (Washington, DC: The Association of American
Colleges and Universities, 1997). back to text
(9) Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom. (New York: The Teachers College Press, 1988).
back to text
The idea for this series of discussion papers on "The Academy in Transition" came from participants in the strategic
planning process recently undertaken by AAC&U. The authors are grateful to the AAC&U Board of Directors, to
dozens of campus leaders and faculty members and to AAC&U's own staff members who contributed substantially both
to the strategic planning and to the decision to develop this series.
We especially want to thank AAC&U President Paula P. Brownlee, who, prior to her retirement in January 1998,
made the planning of this series one of her central priorities. Publication of this paper has been supported by a
fund established to advance AAC&U's strategic plan.
While the views expressed in this paper are the authors' own, they emerge from observation of literally hundreds
of campus-wide and departmentally based efforts to improve the quality of college learning. We have been heartened
and inspired by the educational creativity and commitment that we encounter throughout higher education, in every
part of the country and on every kind of campus. We salute those who work, largely unheralded, to make the benefits
of a challenging liberal education more fully available to an ever wider portion of the United States population.
Many people read earlier drafts of this paper and made suggestions for
its improvement. We thank in particular Paula Brownlee, President
of AAC&U, Brit Kirwan, President of the University of Maryland
at College Park and 1998 Chair of the AAC&U Board of Directors,
and our AAC&U colleagues.
