LiberalArtsOnline Volume 6, Number 2
February 2006
Integration of learning is often cited as a key outcome of liberal arts education. AAC&U includes it as one of the outcomes in their Liberal Education & America’s Promise campaign, and the Center of Inquiry is studying it in the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education. Many schools have distribution requirements, interdisciplinary courses, or capstone projects that might address integration of learning. But are these enough? Is a more intentional approach, one that integrates faculty, curriculum, and assessment needed? In this month's essay, Gary Ruppert writes about how he and faculty at Linn-Benton Community College carefully reexamined their general education core and determined that integration of learning should be a focal point of their students' education. He describes specific approaches they developed to create a connective education and how these changes have benefited both students and faculty.
--Kathleen Wise, Editor
----------------------------------
Moving from Liberal to Connective Education
by Gary Ruppert
Dean, Arts & Communication Division
Linn-Benton Community College
Over the years, the concept of liberal education has gone through several substantive changes. In its classical format, the idea was to help students build a broad base of understanding in multiple disciplines. That usually meant many years studying various subjects in quite some depth. By the end of this endeavor, one became a learned citizen. During the 1960s, we combined the ideas of liberal education with general education so that we had more of a buffet approach to learning. Each student was required to take a specified number of helpings (credits) from various categories, most often in their lower division core. The assumption behind this change was that students would be introduced to a broad array of disciplines, with choices in each that were of most interest to them. But are students able to make connections between all these courses and magically become learned citizens? Are they getting what they need out of college?
Most college degrees still have general education or perspective categories that specify the requisite number of credits or courses, and a list of which courses fulfill each requirement. But unfortunately the connections that students need to make between these courses often happen in a haphazard way, if at all. The common scenario is that they take a writing class, a literature class, and a history class, and compartmentalize each. As they write their history paper, they don’t think about what they learned in the writing class, and the literature they read doesn’t connect to what they have learned about the historic society of that same time period.
Furthermore, as the demands for outcomes and assessment accountability have grown, this lack of connectivity is exacerbated. There are more and more commercial services offering standardized tests for each of the introductory-level liberal arts curriculum, and unfortunately these tests are mostly focused on single-discipline, content-level information. Students are not encouraged to make connections to their own lives or other subjects, with the frequent result that information is left floating in a void and promptly forgotten after the testing takes place.
It is time for another change in how we view a liberal, or general, education. Perhaps it is time to talk about a connective education, one in which we help students see how specific subject content interacts with other subjects and integrates with their own lives. This is often a difficult discussion for faculty because it can make them feel challenged about content coverage—if we are helping students see connections, then we will undoubtedly have less time to cover course content. That brings us face-to-face with the question of how much content depth is necessary in lower division, general education courses.
At Linn-Benton Community College, we wrestled with the balance between depth and connectivity in our general education core, and as we worked on outcomes and assessment strategies, we began moving in a new direction. After struggling with the question of what every student who successfully completes an arts and letters or a social science course should be able to do, we reached agreement that subject content is only a tool for arriving at a destination. We agreed that students need to be able to do something with what they learn, find a personal connection for their knowledge, and see it in multiple contexts. As faculty talked about this, they became excited about the possibilities of how they could revise their classes and develop assessments in which students could demonstrate all that they learned.
A specific example of how we balanced depth and connectivity appears in one of our new arts and letters outcomes: "As a result of successfully completing this class, students will be able to communicate an understanding of the cultural and/or historical contexts, connections with other disciplines, and relevance to their own lives." As this outcome indicates, students must be able to make broader connections, going beyond a single subject, and communicate about those connections, either in writing or orally. Obviously, students must have some content knowledge in order to accomplish this kind of task, but they have to move beyond that content to find the connective links.
How then, do we go about assessing these kinds of connective links? As we developed our outcomes, we also developed sample assessment tasks that instructors could use for examples. Here are some of those suggested activities:
For a literature class – In Leslie Marmon Silko’s "The Man to Send Rain Clouds" the central tension revolves around the burial of a tribal elder. The players in this tension are the members of the Pueblo and a Franciscan priest who has been "assigned" to the reservation. Explore the nature of the clash of cultures and values that Silko surfaces in the story, and in your explanation show how history, tradition, and family values play a role.
For a second-year foreign language class – Keep a journal where each week you select one news story from a foreign service (in that native language) and compare it with the U.S. news coverage of the same topic. Analyze for content as well as connections to cultural differences in viewpoints, politics, etc. Note any particular differences in ethical approach.
In the social sciences, one of the outcomes we decided on was, "As a result of successfully completing this class students will be able to synthesize diverse perspectives that can be expressed in a coherent and applicable manner." This group of faculty felt very strongly that one of the real purposes of a liberal social science course is to help students see multiple perspectives and then synthesize those into a personal viewpoint—something that a learned citizenry should be doing on a daily basis. It is more important that students develop skills that enable them to connect ideas than memorize the ever-expanding data that is present within every discipline. Following are some specific assessment ideas that faculty generated:
For a psychology class – Compare and contrast the sociohistorical and biological views of adolescence. Discuss the evidence for each. How might we view both at work at the same time?
For an economics class – Discuss economic choices that are made as illustrated by the Production Possibilities Curve. As an example use North Korea, and show how choices are made between military and social spending.
For a sociology class – (small group activity) Give students a real case of racial conflict at a high school and ask them to function as a school committee which is charged with drawing up various policies to reduce the racial tensions.
For an anthropology class – (small group project) Use anthropological methods to research a local issue (examples – culture of poverty, culture of specific immigrants, etc.) and produce a report to be given to the manager of a local organization which deals with this issue.
How then do we move from such faculty-written assessment activities to a true determination of student learning? It is one thing to present an assignment or project to students and assign a grade. It is an entirely different issue to determine how well we accomplished our job in helping them make the connective links.
As part of our evolving, continuous improvement cycle, we are gathering samples of student work to review holistically at the end of the year. Each category of general education has multiple outcomes, and students will be assessed at a formative level for all of them. We will designate a single outcome as the "focused outcome," which we will assess in a summative process and then use as a "pull-out" assessment of our own effectiveness. Several classes are selected each term from various instructors, and we will gather the pull-out assessments for every student in those classes.
In practice, this means that an instructor gives an assignment, which is focused on one of the outcomes, as part of their regular class activities. The student work is then "pulled out" and copied for an end-of-year review by a group of faculty from both within and beyond the discipline. They will use a rubric that scores student work based on "demonstrates an understanding of this outcome element," "demonstrates a developing level of understanding of this outcome element," or "does not demonstrate an understanding of this outcome element." We will use this information to determine how well students are achieving the connectivity we are hoping for, and to help faculty understand how they might better help students make these connections.
The most fascinating part of this entire process has been the conversational depth among faculty. They have become more engaged in talking across disciplines and asking questions of each other about how their fields intersect. In so doing, there has been a reengagement of what a liberal or general education means. Even if nothing more was accomplished, this alone was a valuable lesson. It is my belief, though, that we will accomplish much more, because engaged teachers who are helping students find value in moving beyond, will this be on the test? engage students differently. They are not the dispenser of knowledge at the front of the room. They are the cross-pollinators who ask more questions, who generate potentially heated discussions, who push students to make personal connections with the material, and who create ever-broadening circles of integrated insights. I strongly believe that the end result will be students who are on the pathway to becoming learned citizens. Maybe the time has come to think beyond liberal or general education and move towards connective education.
(I would like to express my sincere appreciation for all the Linn-Benton Community College faculty who gave of their time and talents for our endeavors.)
--------------------------------------
Direct responses to lao@wabash.edu. We will forward comments to the author.
--------------------------------------
The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author(s), LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.