Posts Tagged ‘Core Commitments’
I’m sure many of you are as transfixed as I am by the demonstrations in the Middle East and in Madison, Wisconsin. While spurred by very different circumstances and motivations, both are compelling instances of civic engagement and participatory democracy in formation and/or in action. They also both entail the supremely important public challenge of setting appropriate societal priorities in the midst of very challenging economic circumstances. Wisconsin’s governor has put his cards on the table in terms of where education fits into his own view of his state’s priorities. Access to meaningful educational and economic opportunity is also at the heart of democracy movements in the Middle East.
The demonstrations in the Middle East and in Wisconsin also, however, raise many questions about the role of education in advancing participatory democracy. These issues, too, are being debated throughout the higher education and policy communities. How many Wisconsin residents know their state’s history in terms of unions, collective bargaining rights, and educational opportunity? How many know how the salaries and benefits of public school teachers actually compare to those individuals working in the private sector with similar credentials and degrees? Readers of this blog will certainly know that AAC&U has called for all college students to have access to an engaged and practical liberal education—one that prepares them for informed and responsible citizenship as well as for work. College students need and deserve the knowledge, skills, and capacities that prepare them to debate these kinds of issues in productive ways.
One of the most interesting aspects of reading articles online, for me, is reading the comments that come with them. Such was the case recently when I reread a Chronicle of Higher Education article reporting on new research by Anne Colby and William Sullivan, from the Carnegie Foundation’s BELL (Business, Entrepreneurship, and Liberal Learning) project. The project examines models that integrate business and liberal arts education. Integration is particularly critical, Colby and Sullivan stress, in order to strengthen business students’ understanding and navigation of the moral and ethical consequences of business practices.
The Chronicle article focuses on the gulf these researchers have found on many campuses. Business programs frequently employ active, hands-on pedagogies where students become responsible for their own learning, work within groups, and apply principles and methods to new phenomena, either in real-world situations or in simulation. The liberal arts, on the other hand, offer rich ethical and moral frameworks from a host of perspectives, but the pedagogies can often be less active and engaging as a matter of standard practice.
By: Laura Behling
“I don’t know if you’ve heard this before,” John Pryor, director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA, wondered, “but finances are on the minds of a lot of people, not just presidents and boards, but also students who are coming to college.”
Thursday’s release of the 2009 CIRP data by the Higher Education Research Institute noted some intriguing principles and practices of today’s first-year college and university students. Fifty-five percent have some concerns about financing college, the highest percentage since 1971; more students are turning to loans to finance college; their fathers are unemployed at the highest percentage in the history of the survey (4.4 percent); and even though academic reputation is still the top reason students choose a particular school, other concerns, such as affordability or offers of financial assistance, are increasingly having an impact on a student’s choice of school. Perhaps needless to say, colleges and universities will need to be able to deal with students who are increasingly anxious about financing their education.
Recently, David Brooks wrote about two opposing views of character and conduct. In one view, character is stable, people act in accordance with a set of dominant character traits, and the quest for selfhood is really the quest for the “traits of character we need to become virtuous.”
The second view, informed by evidence that people act very differently depending on the circumstance, suggests instead that “we each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context.” Read the rest of this entry »
As college students move from their first to final year, their belief that their campus should focus on contributing to a larger community is stable and strong, but their assessment of whether their institution actually is focusing on this goal becomes increasingly pessimistic. This is just one of the findings included in the new AAC&U publication, Civic Responsibility: What Is the Campus Climate for Learning?, which will be released this Wednesday, on the eve of the Network for Academic Renewal meeting, Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments, taking place in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The report, which features campus climate data gathered at twenty-three leadership campuses involved in the initiative, Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility, includes responses from 24,000 students, evenly divided over all four years of college. The report notes that nearly 45 percent of first-year students strongly agreed that their campus actively promotes awareness of U.S. and global social, political, and economic issues, which is critical to take effective action in communities. However, only one-third of seniors felt as strongly that their campus actively promotes awareness of U.S. issues, and only one-fifth of seniors strongly agreed that their campus actively promotes global issues. Read the rest of this entry »
