Clark/AAC&U Conference on Liberal Education and Effective Practice

The Fall 2009 issue of Liberal Education focuses on the “rich body of research, thought and experience” shared at the Clark University/AAC&U Conference on Liberal Education & Effective Practice, an invitation-only conference that included 30 experts from academia as well as the nonprofit and corporate worlds that took place at Clark University in March 2009.

The following papers were commissioned for the conference:

• Academic Intelligence is Not Enough, by Robert Sternberg  PDF

• Engaged Learning: Enabling Self Authorship and Effective Practice, by David Hodge, Marcia Baxter Magolda, Carolyn Haynes  PDF

• Effective Practice and Experiential Education, by Janet Eyler  PDF

• Designing a Liberal Arts Curriculum that Develops the Capacity for Effective Practice, by Diana Chapman Walsh and Lee Cuba  PDF

Additional articles related to the conference can be found in Liberal Education.

Other articles on liberal education and effective practice

• Refocusing Undergraduate Education on 'Effective Practice': Curricular Change at Clark University
  
  Clark educational models and goals are discussed in the "Member Innovations" feature of AAC&U News (March 2009).

• Liberal Education and Effective Practice: The Necessary Revolution in Undergraduate Education
  
  Richard M. Freeland, Massachusetts Commissioner of Higher Education, presents the call to arms in an article in Liberal Education (Winter 2009). Freeland held the first Jane and William Mosakowski Distinguished Professorship of Higher Education at Clark University and is president emeritus of Northeastern University.

• Connect knowledge with action to ensure the value of higher education
  
  Clark President John Bassett and AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider comment on the movement toward, as well as resistance to, an "unprecedented opportunity … to provide every one of our students with a liberal education that connects their studies to the lives they will lead beyond graduation."

  • Read the article

    • In search of powerful connections between liberal education and effective practice

      The cheers were loud throughout the academy as President Obama chose to put the spotlight on higher education.  In his recent address before the Congress, he called for our nation to have the world's largest proportion of college graduates by 2020.

      As admirable as this goal may be, the anxiety remains palpable for those of us on the receiving end of questions about pursuit of higher education today and its relevance to personal success, especially during a time of economic uncertainty.  What can someone do with a degree in this field, students and families ask?  How can we measure the value of this education? 

      As we advise students and families in these difficult times, we must help them think through their immediate concerns by clarifying the kinds of learning that create a lifetime of opportunities.

      President Obama's pronouncement comes at a time when liberal education is being both scrutinized and reinvented by colleges and universities across America, with today's global challenges very much in mind.  The result--a "necessary revolution," as Massachusetts Commissioner of Higher Education Richard Freeland has named it--is a burgeoning effort to connect liberal education with action and practice.  There is a growing emphasis on connecting the learning that students experience in college to the lives they will actually live, and the challenges they will face, after graduation.

      Through a campaign called Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP), a number of member institutions of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) are helping students learn how to connect their college learning with real-world problems, examined choices, and responsible action both in their personal lives and in their working lives.  This emphasis is gaining ground in all disciplines, across the entire undergraduate curriculum.

      In this effort to connect knowledge with practice, the liberal arts and sciences are asking what they can learn from the strengths of professional fields, such as engineering or public health, while the professional fields expand their reach to incorporate the strengths of the arts and sciences.  We need "more big picture thinking in the professions and more real-world applications in the liberal arts," the late Stephen Weiss, a trustee at both Cornell University and Tulane University, said in summarizing the LEAP vision.

      At Clark University, a curriculum review is underway.  The goal is to reform the undergraduate curriculum to make it more thoughtful and more effective from a developmental, whole-student angle.  Three big questions drive this review:  What does it mean to be an educated person at the beginning of the twenty-first century?  How can the university best use its resources to help students become this person?  How can a student meaningfully connect a rigorous liberal arts education with a real-world skill set?

      As part of a group assembled from colleges, foundations, and industry which attended the recent Conference on Liberal Education and Effective Practice at Clark, we discussed the current landscape of powerful connections between liberal education and effective practice, and also learned how far we have yet to go.

      We considered research from Tufts University's Robert Sternberg, which shows a disconnect between the skills needed to do well in the classroom and those needed for career success.  One may learn to read a Spanish text in college yet be unable to collaborate on the job with co-workers in Madrid.  Summarizing his research on the factors that contribute to success in work contexts, Sternberg calls for educators to focus on how to foster students' analytical, creative, and practical intelligence while cultivating ethical reflection and wisdom. By moving beyond the comparatively narrow emphasis on analytical reasoning that dominates both our testing and our teaching, Sternberg says, we can cast a wider net in selecting talented college applicants, while also preparing students much more fully for their lives beyond college.

      From Miami University of Ohio, David Hodge, Marcia Baxter-Magolda, and Carolyn Haynes reported a broad effort to remap the first-year experience in order to help students see themselves as contributors to the development of knowledge rather than as recipients of what is already known.  The goal is to offer many opportunities across the college years for students to grow in competence by applying what they have been learning to new problems.  Whether juggling undergraduate research, internships, study abroad, or clinical rotations with coursework, a student needs to develop, according to Baxter-Magolda, both the intention and the competence to work with new and unscripted problems.

      Vanderbilt University Professor Janet Eyler's work probes more deeply into the conditions in which experiential or community-based learning can meaningfully improve the quality of liberal education.  Helping AIDS patients during a course on the economics of health care, for example, enhanced students' understanding of the subject matter.  And why learn unless we are to transfer our learning, she asks? 

      Professor Jim Stellar from Northeastern University, long known for its experiential education, suggests there are "head reasons and heart reasons" for pursuing this approach.  He predicts we will soon have research from neuroscientists on the benefits of experiential education, showing that integrating the emotional with the analytical side of learning deepens the knowledge.

      The connection between engaged educational practices and talent development, made by Indiana University's George Kuh with data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, offers additional weight.  Students who start further behind in terms of their entering academic records, as well as those from historically underserved communities, make notable gains both in persistence and in academic achievement when they take part in educational programs that ask them to apply their learning to complex questions, both in courses and in experiential or community-based learning. What Kuh calls "high-impact practices" ­ including first-year seminars, common intellectual experiences, undergraduate research, study abroad, and service learning ­ correlate with positive educational results for students from widely varying backgrounds.  With "underserved student success" a growing priority throughout the United States, Kuh points to the value of applied and experiential learning in helping us achieve this goal.

      Armed with this research­and more­on the value of linking academic learning with practice, Richard Freeland believes that "it is close to a scandal that so many educators are ignoring it."  He and other higher education leaders see this as the moment for the most profound collective change in higher education.

      A century ago, when only five percent of the population went to college, liberal arts educators touted the value of learning for its own sake, and placed a lower value on "applied" learning. But, as President Obama made clear in his address to Congress, all Americans now need college-level learning because our economy ­ and civil society as well ­ require higher levels of knowledge and skill.  We have an unprecedented opportunity, then, to provide every one of our students with a liberal education that connects their studies to the lives they will lead beyond graduation­as citizens, as workers, and as thoughtful human beings. This is an opportunity Americans ought to seize.

      Yet we fall far short of the aspiration to reach more that just an elite tier with this kind of education.  The federal Department of Education's own studies show that first-generation students take fewer courses than others in the humanities, the sciences, the social sciences, the arts, mathematics, and even computer technology.  Other studies show a strong correlation between family income and enrollment in institutions that emphasize the liberal arts and sciences. When this is the case, we deprive millions of college students of the fundamental knowledge they need to make sense of the wider world.

      The new movement to emphasize and integrate both the big picture thinking of the arts and sciences and the real-world focus of the professions can help us break through this impasse.

      Whether students major in the humanities, the sciences, or a technical field, a college education needs to prepare graduates to deal with the complex societal, practical, and ethical questions they will encounter in every sphere of life.  It is not a choice between personal development on the one hand and pre-professional education on the other. 

      With an eye on what we can accomplish far in advance of 2020, we call on all educators to pay new attention to how well we are preparing students to become both engaged citizens and responsible professionals.  Ours is not a debate about tradeoffs.  Against the backdrop of current economic challenges, we can think of no better time than today to move decisively to connect knowledge with action.

    John Bassett, president
    Clark University
    Worcester, Massachusetts
    

    Carol Geary Schneider, president
    Association of American Colleges & Universities
    Washington, DC
    

     

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