Stephanie Fournet Responding to Liz Coleman's Call to Reinvent Liberal Arts Education

Liz Coleman’s call to reinvent liberal arts education charges leaders in higher education with the mission to reverse the current practice of focusing on increased specialization in fields of study and strive for increased cooperation with the declared emphasis towards the advancement of the public good.

Highly specialized degree programs and over-valuing the technical mastery of a particular field lead to a cultural conditioning of disconnection from the greater world that encourages everyone to ignore the crises that we collectively face as a society. Renewing the liberal arts model’s commitment to a more generalized education that begins with the charge to take action and solve problems serves two important goals: the education of the individual and the improvement of society.

Watching Coleman’s talk called to mind two things: Kiran Bir Sethi’s TED talk on empowering children to enact social change and my visit in November to Centenary College.

I’ve addressed Kiran Bir Sethi’s talk in a previous post, but I’ll add that she makes it clear that Coleman’s model can and does work for students before their college years. When Bir Sethi’s students took on projects of civic significance, their scores in all subject areas improved, and they felt the senses accomplishment and citizenship as they impacted the world around them.

Centenary College’s Living Learning Communities program closely mirrors the kind of directional shift that Coleman describes. LLC students are grouped and housed together, along with one or more faculty members, in one of four topic-centered areas. LLC community members identify a problem, work to understand it, and take action to solve it. Students and faculty collaborate and combine their various talents, and they also work with leaders in the community and policy-makers to achieve their goals. Three of these four areas directly correspond to the “public good” focuses that Coleman discussed in her talk. The GreenHouse community focuses on sustainability; the Santé community focuses on improving health for disadvantage people, and the Node community focuses on engaging technology to produce social change. This initiative at Centenary College is only a couple of years old, but it is clear from talking to administration and faculty members, that they can see that it has transformed the level of student engagement and ownership of learning while providing them with experiences that will greatly serve them in their professional lives.

What is happening at Bennington and Centenary can happen everywhere, even in elementary, middle, and high schools. When schools provide action-oriented education, everybody wins.