Abstract
When today’s educators are asked what is most important for their students to learn, they point to an undergraduate degree that is based on an awareness of history, culture, science, and mathematics. Intellectual skills, combined with intercultural awareness and practical competencies, help students consider how to make a difference in the world. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) report Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College defines an invigorating new form of liberal education that is capable of expanding the horizons of students who face a complex and diverse world. The report encourages all members of the academy to develop practices that liberate and open the minds of students in an effort to prepare them for responsible action in the twenty-first century.1 If students are held to high standards of accomplishment, then their education will prove to be, as Greater Expectations suggests, “personally empowering, intellectually challenging, beneficial to civic society, and eminently useful.”2 To this end, the report’s authors emphasize the importance of developing “intentional learners” who are capable of adaptation, integration, and lifelong learning. They believe that intentional learners can flourish when they are “empowered through the mastery of intellectual and practical skills,” “informed by knowledge about the natural and social worlds and about forms of inquiry basic to these studies,” and “responsible for their personal actions and for civic values.”
We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.
John Dewey (1934)
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Notes
The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), 87.
Association of American Colleges and Universities, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002), xii.
Association of American Colleges and Universities, College Learning for the New Global Century: Executive Summary with Employers’ Views on Learning Outcomes and Assessment Approaches (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2008), 3.
Carol Geary Schneider and Robert Shoenberg, Contemporary Understandings of Liberal Education (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 1998), 12.
See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Charles H. Swanson, “Our Medium Is Our Message: Potentials for Educational Theatre,” Theatre Quarterly 9, no. 36 (1980): 61–65.
See Barbara S. Fuhrmann, “Philosophies and Aims,” in Handbook of the Undergraduate Curriculum: A Comprehensive Guide to Purposes, Structures, Practices, and Change, ed. Jerry G. Gaff, James L. Ratcliff, and associates (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 89–90.
See Alexander Meiklejohn, The Experimental College (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932);
Joseph Tussman, Experiment at Berkeley (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). Meiklejohn’s program was short lived (1927–1932); nevertheless, his idea and the work of Joseph Tussman at the University of California, Berkeley, are the roots of interdisciplinary learning community programs. From 1965 to 1969, Tussman championed team-taught classes with interdisciplinary themes based on classical texts.
For more on learning communities, see Faith Gabelnick et al., Learning Communities: Creating Connections among Students, Faculty, and Disciplines, New Directions for Teaching and Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990);
Alan Guskin, Mary B. Marcy, and Barbara Leigh Smith, Learning Communities and Fiscal Reality: Learning in a Time of Restricted Resources, National Learning Communities Project Monograph Series (Olympia, WA: The Evergreen State College, Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, in cooperation with the American Association for Higher Education and the Project on the Future of Higher Education, 2004);
John O’Connor et al., Learning Communities in Research Universities, National Learning Communities Project Monograph Series (Olympia, WA: The Evergreen State College, Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, in cooperation with the American Association for Higher Education, 2003);
Karen K. Oates and Lynn H. Leavitt, Service-Learning and Learning Communities: Tools for Integration and Assessment (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2003).
See Barbara Leigh Smith and Jean T. MacGregor, “What Is Collaborative Learning?” in Collaborative Learning:A Sourcebook for Higher Education, ed. Anne S. Goodsell, Michelle R. Maher, and Vincent Tinto (University Park, PA: National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, 1992), 10.
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© 2012 Nancy Kindelan
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Kindelan, N. (2012). A Contemporary Liberal Education. In: Artistic Literacy. The Arts in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008510_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008510_4
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