The Liberal Arts Education in the 21st Century
By Jayne M. Iafrate
The din inside the Holman Room was unusually loud for a Friday afternoon in early December. Around the rest of campus, students feverishly completed projects and prepared for the finals that would mark the end of a particularly long semester. In the Holman Room, faculty were busy, too.
On the table was a monumental piece of faculty legislation two years in the making, and at stake was a fundamental redefinition of the way Wheaton students learn and professors teach. Even as the meeting got underway, faculty coalitions huddled on either side of the aisle and scribbled last-minute revisions and amendments to the document. As the afternoon faded into evening, heated debate over language gave way to a series of passed and defeated motions.
Nearly five hours later, the easy part was done. Faculty members agreed 91-3 to begin implementation of new general education requirements that allow students more flexibility while concentrating on the core values of a Wheaton liberal arts education. It is designed for the students Wheaton wants to continue to attract[~]young thinkers who wish to explore outside the traditional frameworks of higher education. A liberal arts education for the 21st century looks beyond specific vocation because jobs now change so rapidly.
"We want to produce world citizens who can think well, speak well and write well. We want to produce problem-solvers," said Susanne Woods, provost and professor of English. "With this new curriculum, anything is possible."
The curriculum review--process and product--only could have happened at Wheaton.
"Wheaton College looks very much like a traditional liberal arts college," explained Kersti Yllö, professor of sociology. "But, it was founded on a radical idea--the idea that women should have access to higher education, the radical notion that the brain and the uterus can function simultaneously."
"A more inclusive curriculum will be a richer curriculum," she continued."That doesn't mean we abandon the traditional liberal arts. It means we transform them."
The process began in fall 1999, when a series of events led faculty to reconsider the Wheaton curriculum. The college had just completed a reaccreditation review and the self-evaluation that accompanied the process caused faculty to look at the curriculum "very seriously," according to professor of biology John Kricher.
"We also had a new provost join us in fall 1999, and any school wants to take advantage of the talents that new administrators bring," Kricher continued. "It had been a long time since the last review and it was time to look at it again."
Brainstorming began almost immediately. The Educational Policy Committee--the facilitating body for discussion of educational change at Wheaton--began with trying to envision a new curriculum from scratch and constructing a framework in which to consider how students should learn in the 21st century. The 10 goals that emerged from those initial sessions included:
- Elegance: To create a leaner set of requirements that is dynamic and exciting;
- Collaboration: To take advantage of Wheaton's uniquely collegial faculty;
- Rigor: To set the bar higher for both students and faculty;
- Stronger majors: To become a more selective institution;
- Exploration: To encourage talented students to fully engage in the breadth of the liberal arts;
- Improved advising: To link students and faculty more thoughtfully;
- Fewer requirements: To allow flexibility and exploration;
- Breadth: To ensure that core literacies are met;
- Better distribution: To create smaller classes; and
- Effective assessment: To gauge the success of the curriculum changes.
"We wanted to be bold, but we didn't want to create any panaceas or try to say that we're going to do this...and that's that," Kricher said of the assessment process. "We thought it was essential that we build in an assessment component."
The project quickly spread from the Educational Policy Committee to the entire faculty. By spring 2000 the college received a $40,000 planning grant from the Mellon Foundation and faculty and students had formed study groups, each charged with developing a set of goals for a completely new way of learning and teaching at Wheaton. As Woods said at the time, "All elements of the Wheaton education are on the table."
Study groups examined a host of topic areas, from advising and assessment standards to gender balance, out of classroom learning and writing programs. In all, 18 groups studied aspects of the liberal arts experience and reported back to the entire faculty with observations and recommendations.
As data began to flow from the study groups, faculty also fanned out across the country, visiting 13 colleges and universities to speak with the faculty and administrators responsible for new curriculum development and to observe the ways students interacted with the change. As with the study groups, visiting groups also presented reports to the entire faculty. By spring and summer 2001, faculty re-assembled on campus for workshops and a retreat, and began to transform nearly two years of data into legislation that will transform students well into the next decade. Today, with the endorsement of the faculty in December and Board of Trustees in February, the hard work begins.
*
The changes to the curriculum focus on several key areas: foundations; a new teaching and learning center; writing across the curriculum; connections with breadth; a capstone experience in the major; infusion; and the reduction of requirements from 14 to 8 or 9, depending on department.
The foundations component lays the framework upon which the rest of the educational career is built and seeks to strengthen fundamental communications skills. Students, starting with the Class of 2007, will be required to take the first year seminar, English 101, a quantitative analysis course, two semesters of a foreign language and a new course tentatively named "Beyond the West."
To support the foundations, a college learning center will help students nurture the core literacies expected in the foundations. The center would establish criteria for writing and quantitative analysis, develop standards for student scholarship and strategies for learning, and perhaps undertake other responsibilities related to student performance, such as tutoring and assistance with graduate school and grant applications. It will also support Wheaton's long-held commitment to writing across the curriculum.
"Beyond the West," proposed by Professor of history Vipan Chandra, is one course that engages the cultures of or issues pertaining to a country, people or region historically excluded from the mainstream experience of Western Europe, the United States and Canada or neglected by Western scholarship. The course will help students create a context for future study of global issues throughout the disciplines.
The guiding principle behind the Connections component of the new curriculum is the belief that the most interesting questions happen at the intersections of disciplines. Not satisfied with a static model of general education requirements, the faculty sought a model that will expose students to new ideas and new problems that cross the traditional liberal arts education. Even before the curriculum was approved, some faculty had already started to teach experimental connections courses (See "From Molecules to Masterpieces").
"Connections is designed to move us forward to do significant transformative work," said Yllö. "There is real excitement among a very wide range of faculty who want to collaborate across disciplinary lines. This provides a base for us to explore the boundaries and intersections of our disciplines--the places and spaces where some of the most exciting new scholarship is taking place."
In order to strengthen individual majors, faculty have included a capstone experience for every student in his or her major. The appropriate capstone experience could range from a seminar, a guided research and writing project, an ensemble study and performance, to an exhibition of paintings. Individual departments will determine the appropriate capstone experience that will challenge and strengthen students' theoretical and intellectual grounding and help students synthesize their experience and demonstrate their proficiency in the major.
"Infusion" is a commitment to curriculum transformation through the infusion of gender, race/ethnicity, class, religion, sexuality and global issues across disciplines, bringing concepts that are often marginalized into the mainstream of everyday life. Transformation courses seek to reflect the highest levels of intellectual thinking and to encourage the self-knowledge that should derive from a liberal arts education.
"The central idea behind the infusion model is that it is time to bring the margin to the center," Yllö explained."Groups and regions of the world that have been excluded from conventional scholarship must have their rightful place at the core of our curriculum."
The process and implementation of the curriculum review, which will continue well beyond its recent approval, is enhanced by Wheaton's history as a women's college, Woods said. "There's an atmosphere of collegiality, nurturing and collaboration at Wheaton that's rare among colleges," she added. "At Wheaton, every person is an educator."
