The Power of Integrated Learning

Higher Education for Success in Life, Work, and Society

William M. Sullivan

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781620364109
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Students and their parents wonder if college is worth the investment. Employers want graduates with the skills they need. The public wonders if higher education is preparing future generations for an era of dynamic change. In his latest book, William Sullivan offers a model of higher education that answers all these questions in the affirmative, through the power of integrated learning. Drawing on examples from the 25 members of the New American Colleges & Universities (NAC&U) consortium, the book makes the case for an approach that combines the strengths of the liberal arts, professional studies, and civic responsibility in order to give students the combination of skills and experience that will prepare them for success in all aspects of life after graduation.NAC&U campuses place emphasis upon enabling their students to know themselves and their abilities, as well as providing them with opportunities to develop a sophisticated understanding of the world. To achieve these goals, the academic programs focus on developing students' intellectual and practical skills, such as analytical ability, problem solving, facility in written and spoken communication, and an appreciation for human diversity and creativity. These have traditionally been identified as the goals of a liberal arts education, and are the same ones identified in a national employer survey as giving job-seekers an edge.These institutions also invest a great deal of effort to provide their students with state-of-the-art preparation for professional life and occupational success in diverse fields. These range from the technical – science and technology fields, with disciplines such as engineering and computer science – through business, and across the human service fields, such as education, nursing, pre-medicine, and pre-law, to architecture, and the performing and visual arts. In these courses of study, students begin to shape their future careers.The important third value of a NAC&U education is fostering civic responsibility among students. In programs of study abroad and a range of internship and service opportunities, these colleges support their students in shaping for themselves unique and effective ways to contribute to the larger life of their world.Parents and prospective students may appreciate the chance to learn more about these schools and what they have to offer, while those working in higher education will appreciate the chance to learn more about a model that their own institutions may be motivated to emulate. All readers will take away a picture of a truly vital part of the higher education landscape in this country.

1

THE NEW AMERICAN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES EXPERIENCE

Integrating Liberal Arts, Professional Studies, and Civic Responsibility

For today’s young Americans and their parents, deciding whether to attend college is one of the most important decisions they will ever make. There are good, practical reasons for students and their parents to take pains to make going to college possible. Having a college degree has profound effects on one’s economic well-being, especially over a lifetime.¹ In a nationwide survey, major employers were asked what graduates need to succeed in today’s economy. More than 90% said that in addition to career-specific skills, they sought new employees who had a broad range of knowledge about the world and a strong sense of social responsibility.

This national sample of employers emphasized they were seeking college graduates who could do more than fill the requirements for their first job. The employers surveyed said their companies needed employees who could solve complex problems of many kinds, analyze information and situations, and communicate effectively; too often, it seemed, their new hires lacked one or more of these abilities. The employers believed that a good college education could and should develop these abilities, which are also the traditional aims of what is called education in the liberal arts.

The research project concluded that the challenges of the twenty-first century demand that today’s young people develop four areas of competence that coincide closely with the abilities employers are seeking. First, students need to gain knowledge of human cultures as well as of the physical and natural world. Second, they must be able to think well, meaning they have the ability to inquire and analyze information, think critically and creatively, communicate well in speech and writing, understand quantitative reasoning, use information technology competently, and be able to solve problems with others. Third, students need to grow in personal and social responsibility, including the competence to take part in public affairs and to learn over a lifetime. Fourth, they must be able to integrate their learning to make sense of the world and be able to apply it.²

By fostering these capacities in students, colleges and universities are providing an extremely valuable service. Going to college, then, by any measure, turns out to be a very cost-effective investment. At the same time, college is expensive. Students and their parents rightly ask whether they are getting a high enough value from this investment of time and money. They want to be confident that pursuing a path of study and attending a particular institution will provide all a college education should.

But economic advantage is only the beginning of the value that going to college offers. Other values are in some ways even more practically important than the economic payoff, and these other effects of a good college education are more long lasting and profound. College changes lives. It enables young people to grow into adulthood ready to face the world. But college also changes the society and the world. It is the indispensable provider of key skills that power the economy, especially in this era of information-driven innovation. But equally important, by fostering the growth of students’ interests and self-knowledge, a college education also nurtures new generations of citizens who can explore, create, and contribute in unique ways to make their nation and the world better.

How, then, do you get the most out of college? What should your strategy be for making the big investment of time and money really worthwhile? Getting the most out of a college experience requires active engagement on the part of the students themselves. Colleges can make this all-important personal engagement more likely and more valuable for individual students by providing the right context for them to flourish.

Considerable evidence shows that situations in which students are encouraged to relate what they learn to actual experience are especially effective in making it possible to acquire the four capacities previously noted. Likewise, learning happens more efficiently when students are given opportunities to apply what they study in the classroom to analyzing and solving problems in the world beyond the classroom. Having a chance to consider and address big questions about the world and about one’s own life stimulates the imagination and expands the mind and sympathies, as does developing relationships with diverse kinds of students, staff, and people outside the campus. It is important for standards of performance to be high, and at the same time for students to receive support and encouragement in meeting these standards. These approaches are often called high-impact teaching practices because of their demonstrated ability to motivate students to take advantage of and get the most out of the opportunities college offers.³

Furthermore, the benefits of these high-impact practices are all magnified when they take place in a campus climate that emphasizes and supports personal relationships between students and faculty and among students. Such relationships are part of a campus climate that research indicates is especially favorable to learning and self-development among students.⁴ Students are best able to learn about themselves and what their gifts are in such environments. By discovering what really interests them, opening their minds to previously unknown possibilities, and developing new capacities through self-discipline and hard work, they are able to bring all this together to forge a purpose for living that will promote their growth in ways that connect with others and better the world.⁵

To realize your potential it is important for you to find the right fit between the type of college and the kind of person you wish to become. What are your aspirations for your future? What are the ideals that truly motivate you? What sort of environment will most help you make the most of your gifts and enable you to grow through significant relationships with peers and mentors? In this book, I invite you to take a serious look from many angles at a distinctive kind of college experience, a brand if you will: the 25 private colleges and universities that constitute the New American Colleges and Universities (NAC&U).

Introducing the NAC&U

The NAC&U consortium comprises 25 institutions: Arcadia University, Belmont University, California Lutheran University, Drury University, Hamline University, Hampton University, John Carroll University, Manhattan College, Nazareth College, North Central College, Ohio Northern University, Pacific Lutheran University, Roger Williams University, Samford University, St. Edward’s University, The Sage Colleges, University of Scranton, University of Evansville, University of La Verne, University of New Haven, University of Redlands, Valparaiso University, Wagner College, Westminster College, and Widener University.

These institutions are each quite distinct in their mission, faculty, and student body. NAC&U institutions are geographically distributed across the United States, but they all have a common goal: to provide a distinctive educational experience, described as “dedicated to the purposeful integration of liberal education, professional studies, and civic engagement.” All of them provide this kind of education in primarily residential settings in small to middle-size campus communities of between 2,000 and 7,500 students. At NAC&U institutions, faculty and staff all see themselves as educators sharing a calling to foster their students’ growth as people and as citizens. They are regularly cited as among the colleges that provide the best value for the money as well as a diverse array of areas of study, a strong campus community, and ways to join academic preparation to career preparation.

In other words, an NAC&U education is intended to enable students to discover and develop your talents so you can make a place for yourself in the world in an important way that includes finding work and a satisfying career. Additionally, an NAC&U education aims to equip you to learn for a lifetime, enabling you to make sense of today’s fast-changing and often confusing world. Even more, an NAC&U education is integrative by design, providing the breadth and depth of vision necessary for you to find what you want to stand for in life and hone your specific talents to contribute positively to your nation and the world.

To understand the kind of educational experience these institutions try to provide, it helps to understand something of the background of the organization and its animating spirit.

What NAC&U Stands For

As in all great ventures, this one began with a vision, but it was a vision of what was possible rather than a utopia. In the 1990s there was increasing concern that American higher education was giving up on its most distinctive heritage; that is, that college could and should teach students how to learn about the world and then apply that learning to the betterment of their own lives and those around them. To address this concern, a group of leaders in higher education gathered at Wingspread, the visionary house in Wisconsin designed by the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The group included Alexander Astin, who had written extensively on what American students aspired to in their education and their futures; Ernest Boyer, distinguished president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who contributed his broad overview of higher education as a whole; and Frank Wong, vice president of the University of Redlands, one of today’s NAC&U members. These leaders proposed a renewal of the ideal of what they called the New American College, which they defined as an institution of higher learning dedicated to the integration rather than the specialized separation of research and teaching, theory and practice, and learning and life.⁶

That meeting in 1995 produced the Association of New American Colleges, which subsequently became the NAC&U. The organization continues to stand for its founding vision of creating an integrative higher education reflected in the motto that declares its mission: “the purposeful integration of liberal education, professional studies, and civic engagement.” This mission is a demanding one; it requires the member institutions to strive actively for an educational ideal that resists the drift toward specialization and separation that is such a marked feature of contemporary life. Instead, NAC&U as a consortium and its members as particular institutions work actively to embody their alternative vision of a new American college. Boyer described that aim well by insisting that to achieve it “all parts of campus life—recruitment, orientation, curriculum, teaching, residence hall living, and the rest— must relate to one another and contribute to a sense of wholeness.” Boyer singled out the idea of community to describe this aim:

We emphasize this commitment to community not out of a sentimental attachment to tradition, but because our democratic way of life and perhaps our survival as a people rest on whether we can move beyond self-interest and begin to understand better the realities of our dependence on each other.⁷

An NAC&U education takes place on campuses designed to foster the kind of community spirit Boyer urged. All 25 member colleges and universities are places where education is personal, and faculty see themselves as scholar teachers devoted to developing their students’ capacities to take part in the life of the mind. They know their students personally and interact with them frequently. In the same way, students often remark on finding a welcoming sense of community, whether they reside on campus or commute.

Because of the intimate scale of NAC&U campuses, academic work easily blends with an array of extracurricular activities, ranging from sports to the performing and visual arts. These are not impersonal institutions; people know faces and names, and students and staff find it natural to look out for one another. Students typically find it easy to develop relationships with career counselors who can help them connect their academic interests with professional preparation, and students need not enter their final year without vocational direction or options. Additionally, NAC&U institutions encourage students to become involved with communities beyond the campus. Civic engagement is a prominent feature of curricular and extracurricular student life. In this book, you will get to know a good deal about the common aspects of an NAC&U education and the distinctive features of the various member campuses that tend to support the judgment of Edward L. Ayers, historian and president emeritus of the University of Richmond: “NAC&U lives up to Boyer’s vision better than any other organization in higher education.”⁸

These characteristics are directly related to the aim of this distinctive brand of education: integrating liberal arts, professional studies, and civic responsibility. The faculty and staff of all the institutional members of the NAC&U consortium work hard to maintain a certain type of campus climate that enables students to thrive through making connections to their personal goals, experience the excitement of exploring knowledge, prepare for a career, and learn how to be an active citizen.

A Kaleidoscope of the NAC&U Experience

To get a sense of what integrating liberal arts, professional studies, and civic responsibility looks like at some of these campuses, let’s consider each of these three elements and how various campuses make them work together.

The Power of Liberal Learning

All NAC&U campuses place emphasis on enabling their students to know themselves and their abilities as well as providing them with opportunities to develop a sophisticated understanding of the world. To achieve these goals, the academic programs focus on developing students’ intellectual and practical skills, such as analytical ability, problem solving, facility in written and spoken communication, and an appreciation for human diversity and creativity, all of which have been traditionally identified as the goals of a liberal arts education. This typically means studying a variety of subjects and intellectual disciplines to better understand the complex world we inhabit. Often, these subjects are divided into three groups: mathematics and the natural sciences, which focus on how the world works and how to devise new technologies to work on the world; the social sciences, which aim to understand the way human society and human beings work; and the arts and humanities, which explore what it is like to be human and how to take part in the human world. It is worth noting that the capacities developed by liberal learning are the same ones identified in the previously mentioned national employer survey as those that give job seekers an edge.⁹

A strong grounding in the liberal arts, which is a core mission of all NAC&U institutions, can produce amazing results. Liberal learning enables people to see farther, understand more deeply, and grasp problems more effectively than would be possible without such training by giving students ways to notice what most do not; see in new ways; analyze how nature works and how we have come to live and think as we do; and investigate the values and beliefs that guide societies and individuals, especially when these influences are unnoticed. Using these techniques can provide levers to change seemingly impossible problems or move obstacles.

For example, everyone must cope with the side effects of today’s technology. These can be serious, as when the environmental effects of industrial processes challenge the quality of life. Many find these types of negative effects confusing, so they shy away from confronting such problems until they become serious or even overwhelming threats perhaps to their families and communities. The virtue of liberal learning, as we will see shortly, is that it can change mind-sets by enabling people to learn how to think more flexibly and broadly so they can work with various, sometimes opposing, points of view and not be overwhelmed by the conflict. Liberally educated people can confidently expect to grasp complex problems and work with others to solve them. But it takes time and effort to acquire these abilities, which is what college education in the liberal arts is for.

Learning Communities at Wagner College

At Wagner College, on New York City’s Staten Island, first-year students begin their college careers with a vivid introduction to these elements of liberal learning. All new Wagner students become part of the Wagner Plan for the Practical Liberal Arts, the plan of study shared by all Wagner students, called a learning community. Each learning community consists of two groups of 14 students led by two faculty members who teach two courses in their disciplines that are linked by a common theme or topic. As part of these courses, students spend about three hours per week in off-campus activities ranging from field trips to New York metropolitan sites to service-learning with community organizations. Along with the two linked courses, the third component of the Wagner learning community is the reflective tutorial in which students analyze intensively, discuss, and write about the connections between the concepts in their classes and their experiences off campus. The small class size is designed to encourage personal interactions among students and faculty. The fact that two courses from different disciplines are linked allows faculty members from different departments to interact with each other as well as with the students.

In the first-year learning community, Living on Spaceship Earth, students focus on a big question: Given how tightly living things and technologies are interconnected in the planetary environment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The New American Colleges And Universities Experience
• 2. Only Connect
• 3. Finding Yourself
• 4. Becoming A Citizen And Engaging With The World
• 5. After The Bachelor’s Degree
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Campus Profiles
• Appendix B: Graduate Programs Offered By New American Colleges And Universities Members
• Bibliography
• About The Author
• Index
• Back Cover