Liberal Education, Summer 2014
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Current Issue

Summer2014Vol.100No.3

Leading Change from the Classroom

Faculty Designs for Curricular Reform

This issue focuses on the leadership role individual faculty members can play as agents of curricular change by, for example, customizing student course evaluations, incorporating a global perspective into courses, and redesigning first-year orientation courses. Also included are an appeal to attend to the formation of students’ souls, a call for a new developmental paradigm for liberal education, a history of the Wye Faculty Seminars, and a warning about a creeping managerialism within college and university administration.

Table of Contents
President's Message

Toward That Second Century: Making Liberal Education Inclusive

By Carol Geary Schneider

From 1818 R Street NW

From the Editor

By David Tritelli

Featured Topic

Rethinking the Student Course Evaluation

How a Customized Approach Can Improve Teaching and Learning

By W. Lee Hansen
By incorporating required questions from standard evaluation forms, individual faculty members can create evaluation forms that meet their own needs as well as those of their departments.

Globalizing the Curriculum

How to Incorporate a Global Perspective into Your Courses

By Frank Louis Rusciano
Integrating a “global perspective” into courses necessarily involves examining whether our traditional disciplinary assumptions still apply in a global context and, if not, how they need to be translated in order to remain relevant.

Redesigning the First-Year Orientation Course

How a Discipline-Specific Approach Can Deepen Student Engagement

By Ivan Fuller
The challenges first-year orientation courses are designed to address can be met more easily when students have a common interest in the subject matter and are in the same class as their fellow majors.

Perspectives

Cultivating “Sparks of the Divinity”

Soul-Making as a Purpose of Higher Education

By Bobby Fong
What is needful in higher education today is a renewed urgency and commitment to assist our students in forming their souls. And if soul-making is integral to education at colleges and universities—whether secular or religious—then it ought to make itself felt in all areas of academic life.

A New Paradigm for Liberal Education

By Robert J. Thompson Jr.
To be responsive to twenty-first-century societal needs for civic-minded graduates who have the capacities and dispositions to engage difference and generate knowledge in the service of society, higher education needs to recommit to providing a formative undergraduate liberal education and adopt a developmental model to guide educational practices.

O Taste and See: A Commemorative History of the Wye Seminars

By Robert Holyer
From the beginning, the appeal of the seminars has been the experience of reading important texts, taking extended time for reflection, and engaging colleagues in thoughtful and rigorous discussion. Participation offers a powerful renewal in the deeper meaning of liberal education and intellectual community.

My View

Standing up to Managerialism

By Stephen Rowe
“Managerialism,” a relatively new orientation to college and university administration, is a major factor in struggles over the shape and substance of education today—one that is not friendly to education as the cultivation of the kinds of human beings so urgently needed.

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