April 24, 2009
Conference on liberal education & effective practice
Clark U conference draws top higher education leaders to spur national dialogue on liberalarts education, real-world solutions
Many of the top innovative minds from academia met at Clark University for a conference on Liberal Education and Effective Practice, sponsored by Clark's Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise in partnership with the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), on March 12 and 13. Approximately 30 participants, including members of the nonprofit and corporate worlds, shared their research, expertise and experience, engaging in frank and extensive examination of the relationship between traditional models of liberal education and effective practice.
"Clark organized this conference because there is a pressing need to rethink boldly how colleges and universities can create enhanced undergraduate liberal arts programs that do prepare students to be well-informed critical thinkers capable of solving difficult social challenges," said Clark University President John Bassett.
The conference's focus on effective practice is also at the heart of the LEAP Initiative (Liberal Education and America's Promise) of the AAC&U.
"We need to think about what worked well for some of us and figure out how to adapt that to work well for all of us," said Carol Geary Schneider, president of the AAC&U. "What worked in the 20th century won't work in the 21st century."
The conference was organized by Richard Freeland, Massachusetts Commissioner of Higher Education, president emeritus of Northeastern University, and the first Jane and William Mosakowski Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at Clark. Freeland is nationally known for his leadership in practice-oriented education, emphasizing the importance of connecting liberal learning, professional preparation and real-world experience.
"The belief that liberal education should focus on a narrow range of intellectual qualities is being revised to include an emphasis on connecting ideas with action," Freeland wrote in his recent article in the AAC&U's award-winning journal Liberal Education. "These developments constitute a profoundly important, indeed revolutionary, challenge to the version of liberal education that has dominated American higher education since the early years of the twentieth century."
Conference participants included: Robert Sternberg, the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts and a longtime Yale psychologist; David Hodge, president of Miami University, and his colleagues, professor Marcia Baxter Magolda and Honors Program director Carolyn Haynes; Professor Janet Eyler, of Vanderbilt; Diana Chapman Walsh, former president of Wellesley, and her associate, professor Lee Cuba; George Kuh, Chancellor's Professor of Higher Education at Indiana University; Steve Stemler, professor at Wesleyan University; and Armando Bengochea, Dean of the College Community at Connecticut College.
Four commissioned papers served as touchstones for conference panel discussions: "Academic Intelligence is Not Enough" (Sternberg); "Engaged Learning: Enabling Self Authorship and Effective Practice" (Hodge, Magolda, and Haynes); "Effective Practice and Experiential Education" (Eyler); and "Designing a Liberal Arts Curriculum that Develops the Capacity for Effective Practice" (Chapman Walsh and Cuba).
The concluding session provided a summary and dialogue on ways to strengthen the connection between liberal education and effective practice. The work of the conference will be shared with higher education interests around the country through the Web and print outlets of the AAC&U.
Following are some participants' reflections on the conference:
Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Bard Center Distinguished Fellow, Bard College at Simon's Rock and Charles Warren Professor of the History of Education, Harvard University - "The challenges are massive. The challenges are basically to redraw the map of knowledge so that we bring theory and practice much more together. One of the things we need to do, in order to bring theory and practice together, is to understand much more about translation, which is really what the Mosakowski Institute is trying to do, trying to translate university knowledge into practice in the real world. And in education we need to have usable knowledge that takes the findings of research and puts them into the tools that teachers actually use in classrooms. That's one example. But we really don't know how to do that. So there are still new fields that we need to develop, as we are trying to move institutions toward educating graduates and undergraduates students in different ways."
David Hodge, President, Miami University – "Now, at this time, with some of the venerable ideas of a liberal education, some of the liberating ideas that technology has provided us, and then with the insights of developmental theory, we can accomplish so much more than we ever thought possible. So this conference at this time is a great, great moment."
Carol Geary Schneider, president of the AAC&U - "Clark did something quite extraordinary in creating the opportunity for this kind of community. Leaders, faculty members, scholars come together to share their insights, both about where the evidence pushes us, but also about where we are in a moment of time. We're in a period of significant transition. A lot has been accomplished in terms of new approaches to the curriculum, new emphasis on connecting the community to what's happening in the classroom. And I think this conference is going to move that agenda forward in significant ways because it's helped us look at the pieces in relation to one another—the research, the practice, the larger dynamic, and that's a very rare opportunity to be able to step back and see in brighter light what's really happening educationally."
To learn more about the conference on Liberal Education and Effective Practice, visit the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise online at http://www.clarku.edu/research/mosakowskiinstitute/conferences/mar12/index.cfm.