Author Archive
The humanities are both central and necessary to a liberal—and liberating—education. The humanities help us make sense of the complexity of the world we inherit—including our histories, values, and cultural traditions. They help us explore competing visions of the past and future and probe what it means to be human. All these themes are vitally important both to individuals and to our society. One of the academy’s most fundamental responsibilities is to explore and teach about global issues and democratic aspirations and realities at home and abroad. These explorations and the root commitments to equality, liberty, and the expansion of justice all depend fundamentally on the humanities’ heartbeat.
While there are other important dimensions to liberal education as AAC&U has made clear in its Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) articulation of “Essential Learning Outcomes,” it is absolutely impossible to provide students with the benefits of liberal learning absent a strong grounding in humanities questions, disciplines, and perspectives. The humanities are necessary to any institution that claims to provide a high quality college education.
Higher education looms ever larger in the national consciousness, but unhappily, the public discussion about the purposes of higher learning grows ever more emaciated. Both under Presidents Bush and Obama, this discussion has become far too narrow and technocratic. “It’s the economy, stupid” seems somehow to have become “It’s the economy, so go narrow!”
If you read this blog, you likely already know the AAC&U “take” on college learning. Today’s students need a liberal education because that is the only degree plan that addresses all the essential aims of college study: preparation for work, citizenship, and a fulfilling life. Liberal education does this by fostering “big picture” knowledge of human cultures and the natural world; high-level intellectual and practical skills; examined commitments to ethical and social responsibility; and the demonstrated ability to integrate and apply one’s knowledge, skills, and responsibilities to complex problems – problems in work, life and citizenship.
Much has already been written about the unlikely success of the Butler Bulldogs in the NCAA tournament. For such a small school from a minor conference, making it to the finals of the NCAA tournament is, indeed, an unlikely and remarkable phenomenon—and a tribute to the hard work of the Butler coach and his players. It is also worth noting, however, that both Duke and Butler provide academically rigorous programs for all their students, including for their athletes. They both can boast about their 90-percent-plus graduation rates as well.
Butler’s leaders have been working hard in recent weeks to help everyone see that the Butler phenomenon is as much an educational phenomenon as it is an athletic one. See, for instance, the wonderful profile of Butler’s president in the New York Times, with its headline focus on educational excellence. (Full disclosure: both Butler and Duke are members of AAC&U, and Butler’s president, Bobby Fong, is on AAC&U’s board of directors).
In a recent interview in Inside Higher Ed, where author Paul Gaston discusses the subject of his new book, The Challenge of Bologna: What United States Higher Education Has to Learn From Europe, and Why It Matters That We Learn It, Gaston urges engagement with developments in Europe:
We share most of Europe’s priorities for higher education. We believe that increased accountability should support responsible comparisons of programs and institutions, that students should have less difficulty in transferring academic credits, that the credentials we offer should be more easily understood by the public, that teaching should be more intentional in the light of a consensus on outcomes, and that as a nation we should remain highly competitive in attracting international students. We have important initiatives under way in many of these areas. But the Bologna Process represents a coordinated commitment to such reforms that is monitored continually throughout the continent. With one decade of progress to report, Europe can offer us a useful example.
On October 16, Inside Higher Ed (IHE) posted a truly wonderful interview with three Chinese students who studied at Bowdoin, Bucknell, and Franklin and Marshall, respectively. As someone who spends a lot of time making and listening to arguments on behalf of liberal education, I have never seen it better done.
It was especially heartwarming to see these students recognize their own responsibility to help chart a sense of coherent educational direction in the context of the many-splendored options that a liberal arts college opens to its students. I took special note of their clear explanation that a key difference between the liberal arts approach and their own earlier schooling was the determination to wean students from any inclination to come up with only the “prescribed” answers. Read the rest of this entry »
In an Inside Higher Ed essay, colleagues who developed the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) attacked both the concept of e-portfolios as a strategy for assessing students’ learning gains and my own argument that it is high time to break the habit of treating standardized tests as a source of special and privileged insight into an individual’s potential and/or achievement across a course of study.
For the convenience of readers who are just learning about AAC&U’s approach to assessment, we’re providing links to three resources available to download.
1) The first is Our Students’ Best Work: A Framework for Accountability Worthy of Our Mission. Revised and reissued last year, this is an official Board of Directors statement. It describes ways of focusing assessments on students’ actual work, completed across the curriculum. The core idea is captured in the title. Assessments ought to motivate students to do their very best work, and higher education ought to make the production of such “best work” a focal point for the college curriculum. When students are producing “authentic work,” that work can be assessed using validated rubrics by faculty who have been trained to apply rubrics to samples of student work.
Recognizing the scalability challenge this approach to assessment presents, Our Students’ Best Work recommends that each academic program build into the regular curriculum abundant opportunities for students to practice and produce work that deploys important college outcomes, such as analysis, communication, problem solving, engagement with difference, and integrative learning. For purposes of institutional assessment and external reporting, a random sample of portfolios can be scored and reported using rubrics and multiple blind raters.
2) The second link takes you to the VALUE rubrics that have just been released through AAC&U’s federally funded national project, Rising to the Challenge. These rubrics are keyed to the essential learning outcomes that AAC&U has developed—in concert with the higher education community—through its ongoing initiative, Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP). The LEAP VALUE rubrics feature “dimensions” of specific learning outcomes that faculty should take into account in determining a student’s growth in competence through his or her studies. The VALUE project studied hundreds of existing campus rubrics for specific learning outcomes that faculty had already developed to assess student work and progress. The rubrics were developed by faculty-led expert teams and have been tested multiple times against actual student work at many different institutions.
3) The third link takes you to my own essay, “The Proof is in the Portfolio,” which I published last year to express my dismay that higher education, in the wake of the Spellings furor, was now piloting the use of a single test to be taken by student volunteers that would supposedly provide external evidence about what students have learned over time. While I respect my CLA colleagues for their psychometric fervor, I stand firmly by my view that no institution should use a single test, taken by a set of student volunteers, to form or report judgments about the quality of student achievement across the entire family of programs and majors.
As I said in my essay, we are educators. As educators, we have a responsibility to help our constituents distinguish between good practice and bad practice. Using a single measure to capture the academic achievement of an entire college or university curriculum is bad practice.
