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Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts |
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Lawrence University |
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Strengths On February 5, 1945, at the initiative of President Nathan Pusey (later, President of Harvard), the Lawrence faculty received a memorandum proposing a change to the Freshman curriculum to include a course that would "endeavor to give the student a mastery of the mechanics of effective writing, reading and speaking; introduce the student, through the study of a small number of books of major importance, to the four great human enterprises-philosophy, science, art, and religion; acquaint the student with the nature of a college of liberal arts, and especially with the program, departmental structure, and teaching personnel of Lawrence; encourage a more active student participation in the learning process; and emphasize the discussion of ideas rather than the acquisition of knowledge." Now known as "Freshman Studies," this course, in some form or fashion, has represented-for almost sixty years-the most distinctive feature, and single greatest strength, of the academic program at Lawrence. Aside from the academic virtues mentioned above, continuity, longevity, and a serious and pervasive institutional commitment are some of the sources of strength for Freshman Studies. To highlight this, the following example is illustrative: On October 9, 1945, Mr. Pusey himself delivered the first lecture on Plato's Republic; since then, though there are annual additions and deletions to the reading list, no student has graduated from Lawrence without reading The Republic in Freshman Studies, a fact that binds every alumnus and alumna in a common intellectual bond. Of lesser importance, but still of note, as in 1945, students today may be assigned to a section taught by a Dean, Associate Dean, and even the President, in addition to the many other Lawrence faculty drawn from across the divisions and from the Conservatory. In a January 11, 2002 letter, Freshman Studies was recognized by Bruce Cole, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, as "a superb example of how the humanities can form the core of a sound undergraduate education." In congratulating Lawrence on its receipt of a prestigious and rare NEH challenge grant, Mr. Cole further noted that the Endowment and its reviewers "found the program particularly meritorious since few institutions of Lawrence University's caliber have successfully engaged faculty members in a common learning experience for all students and convinced so considerable a number to teach in the program." In an effort to extend some of the benefits of Freshman Studies throughout the curriculum, the faculty at Lawrence adopted, in May 2000, a new set of General Education Requirements that go beyond divisional distribution to include writing, speaking, foreign language and quantitative reasoning competency as well as diversity requirements. These new requirements put Lawrence on the leading edge of curricular innovations in the U.S. and are a potential source of future strength. Another strength worth noting: instruction at Lawrence-not only in the sciences but in any area with a lab and practicum component (e.g. Gender Studies, Theatre, Studio Art, some of the Social Sciences)-tends to focus on "doing" the discipline, rather than on purely theoretical or passive acquisition of knowledge through reading and attendance at lectures. There is also a high level of student participation in tutorials, independent studies, honors projects and faculty-directed research programs. Challenges One negative effect of the predominance of Freshman Studies at Lawrence is the perception it can create that what comes next is less planned, less purposeful, and less essential to student academic development in general. There is a shared, and growing, concern that, in the College, students, after their intensive and focused first year, are in some ways cast adrift in following years. We acknowledge that sophomores, unlike freshmen, have no defining curricular moment or program and there is no coherent trajectory to their subsequent academic development. Certainly, there are some things a college cannot and should not try to manage: serendipity, chance, and a constellation of factors related to an individual's interests and talents, successes and failures, all play a role in the direction a student will ultimately take. But there are some other important and concrete steps that all students take as they complete their degrees. At Lawrence, we have identified these steps in preliminary ways-from academic exploration, to the declaration of a major, to the completion of a research project or study abroad, up to a defining senior experience-but we have yet to design or develop, fully and effectively, programmatic features of the Lawrence experience that will facilitate our students' progress. The result, of course, is that some students do not feel strongly connected to the College, to a discipline, to a department, to an advisor, or to any particular instructor, instructors, or peers. In different but related ways, the insular nature of particular departments and the rigorous structure of certain curricular programs may work to impede some increasingly important aspects of student development. More and more often, students are discovering experiential learning opportunities (e.g. internships for credit, service learning projects) that are appropriate components of, or complements to, their studies. Similarly, and with greater frequency, students are becoming aware of the value of spending time on an international or off-campus program. Such opportunities at Lawrence, however, are not available with any consistency to the entire student population. We have tried, with partial success, to promote and institute internships throughout the college curriculum; some departments, however, hesitate to offer them. For study abroad, students in departments with a strict set of major requirements simply may be unable to get away. We have tried to address this challenge by increasing the range and number of affiliated international programs (including one in Hungary, focused exclusively on Math), and encouraging departments to incorporate study abroad into their offerings, but there are clearly budgetary and curricular limits to this approach. If the years prior to graduation may be marked, at times, by drift and missed opportunities, the final year at Lawrence does not necessarily represent, unfortunately, a time of academic resolution. To Freshman Studies, our featured inaugural academic experience, there is no corollary "Senior Studies" and so a feeling may arise that, after four years, a student's experience does not in fact conclude; rather, it just ends. Many other schools have capstone courses or experiences, senior projects, and the like. We have them, too, in some of our departments. But we do not have them in every department and, for those that are available, there is no coherent curricular presentation, nor is there an institutionally supported definition of their nature or an endorsement of their educational importance. Developing a "bookend" to Freshman Studies is a challenge that Lawrence seeks to confront directly and in the near future. Project Lawrence University would like to develop a capstone experience with a coherent curricular conception and presentation and a strong base of institutional support. Our long-term hope is to design this programmatic feature in a way that would afford it a status and stature that could, with time, approach that of the college's Freshman Studies program. In our project (which, at this point, we view largely as a planning initiative), we will seek to accomplish the following: a definition of the capstone experience that is at once flexible, rigorous, and easily understood; the design of a set of criteria (for eventual endorsement and adoption by the faculty) to be used in and across departments for the development of a capstone experience; and the articulation of a strategy for communication and implementation that seeks to achieve the highest possible level of participation and promotion across the College. Team Members
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Return to: College strengths Return to: Engagement Project |
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