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Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts |
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Residential liberal arts colleges have a long history of offering outstanding educational experiences to their students. In their classrooms and in informal encounters, they work to engage students in the practices of a liberal education -- inquiry, investigation, reflection and communication. Their faculty and staff focus on students and their academic and personal development throughout their college careers. From 2002-2006, ACM, with the support of the Mellon Foundation, undertook a project designed to help faculty and staff understand and support their students through this trajectory. "Engaging Today's Students With the Liberal Arts" was interested in how students move through their four years of a liberal arts education, and how academic and co-curricular programs encourage their engagement. It looked at the student academic experience, starting with the foundation laid in the first year, moving to the transition to sophomore year, and finishing with senior capstone experiences. The project's goals were:
The project was aimed primarily at faculty, but also engaged the staff and administrators involved in this trajectory, including student life staff, librarians, instructional technologists, career advisors and others. Each college named a liaison to help guide the project. These people -- faculty and administrators -- worked with their chief academic officers to identify their campuses’ best practices and goals, choose their representatives at the conference, and guide the on-campus project afterwards. |
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The project opened with a conference, "First Year and Beyond," at Beloit College on March 7-9, 2003, focusing on the first year as a foundation for the transformative experience of a college education. In preparation for the conference, each college identified its strengths and challenges in supporting student academic development. The conference developed a network of people who will continue to work after the conference on collaborative projects addressing the needs of ACM colleges. Several of the campuses are following up on the conference by discussing and reshaping their programs. Here are reports of some of those efforts. The second conference was on "Learning and Teaching Across the Liberal Arts," held March 5-6, 2005, at Lake Forest College. Faculty and administrators discussed new understandings of learning and their implications for liberal arts colleges. They also assessed models for collaborative learning, experiential education, and off-campus study. The third conference, in fall 2005, concluded the project by looking at "The Future of Liberal Education." What does the future hold for liberal arts colleges? What will their future students be like? How will the society be different? And how should they respond? This conference reviewed the project's work, assessed the changes facing liberal arts colleges, and speculated on what colleges can do to prepare. Faculty were invited to a Teaching Partners retreat, where they discussed their teaching and shared ideas. The retreat was in June 2006. Many of the ACM colleges have developed programs for first-year students, but there was been growing interest on our campuses in the concerns of sophomores. There was a roundtable to discuss sophonmore year concerns and programs at Monmouth College, October 27-29, 2006. The project gave grant support to a variety of efforts--including individual campus projects, collaboration among several colleges, workshops for representatives of each campus, additional conferences, and surveys. A first round of grant recipients were selected in the summer of 2003. A second round of grants was awarded in February 2006. It is clear that academic advising is essential to engaging students in their educations, especially in the liberal arts tradition. The directors of academic advising have met and shared ideas. They also planned a workshop to train and revitalize faculty as advisors. You can find more details here. The project invited colleges to propose projects that would strengthen faculty advising; the supported projects are listed here. At the Beloit conference in spring 2003, Carol Trosset, former director of institutional research at Grinnell, presented some findings based on statistical studies of ACM students.Ms. Trosset also surveyed ACM students about their understanding of the liberal arts, compared to the stated goals of the colleges. William Skinner, the director of institutional research at Lawrence, began a longer-term and longitudinal investigation of student, faculty, and alumni beliefs and goals of a liberal education. He will be working with representative groups from each of the ACM colleges, concluding with an alumni survey in 2011. The guiding deans want this project's influence to extend after its conclusion and beyond those who participated in its programs. Their article, "Shooting the Gap: Engaging Today’s Faculty in the Liberal Arts," appeared in Liberal Education (92:3).
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