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What happens when higher education is introduced to the exploration of meaning and purpose? Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose analyzes a remarkable experiment--lasting over a decade and encompassing 88 independent campuses--to reconfigure undergraduate education as a journey toward life purpose. It ties together the liberal arts, personal development, and preparation for life all through the exploration of vocation.
In a remarkable experiment lasting over a decade, a group of 88 independent campuses, ranging from comprehensive universities to intimate colleges, have demonstrated the value of an emerging educational agenda focused on meaning and purpose. These programs have shown that college can provide emerging adults with an understanding of themselves within today's insecure and highly competitive world that enhances their ability to develop the "grit" needed to create meaningful lives. By focusing on the exploration of vocation and its theological foundations, the programs have produced remarkable outcomes in enhanced student engagement in the learning process and more effective entry into adult life. Discernment of vocation provides for many students a synthetic and compelling focus for intellectual and practical exploration. Sustained by articulate reflection and grounded in communities of learning that include faculty as well as students, undergraduate life takes on new significance and urgency. Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose analyzes a series of successful efforts to reconfigure undergraduate education as a journey toward life purpose. Examining the experiences of students and faculty, William M. Sullivan reveals the concrete importance of this educational agenda for individual lives and particular campuses. By connecting the several dimensions of undergraduate experience through reflection on purpose, Sullivan demonstrates how these programs expanded the bandwidth of academic learning in energizing and exploratory ways. Within the larger, troubled environment of contemporary higher education, these pioneering efforts hold promise for a significant rethinking of the undergraduate experience to better serve students and society.
A unique handbook for collegiate faculty, instructors, administrators, and graduate students in education to help professional and technical students discover meaning, purpose, and vocation through their scholarship. College students are looking for more than instrumental career knowledge and skills, they are looking for something to care about and build their lives around: a vocation. The book provides recommendations to enhance and amplify collegiate professional and technical instruction and curricula to support student discernment of vocation. Teaching to Inspire Vocation begins by making a case for teaching for vocation and provides a historical perspective on vocation in Western education. However, the core of the book focuses on the specific elements for an instructional framework on teaching for vocation.
For over forty years, Leland Ryken has championed and modeled a Christian liberal arts education. His scholarship and commitment to integrating faith with learning in the classroom have influenced thousands of students who have sat under his winsome teaching. Published in honor of Professor Ryken and presented on the occasion of his retirement from Wheaton College, this compilation carries on his legacy of applying a Christian liberal arts education to all areas of life. Five sections explore the background of a Christian liberal arts education, its theological basis, habits and virtues, differing approaches, and ultimate aims. Contributors including Philip Ryken, Jeffry Davis, Duane Litfin, John Walford, Alan Jacobs, and Jim Wilhoit analyze liberal arts as they relate to the disciplines, the Christian faith, and the world. Also included are a transcript of a well-known 1984 chapel talk delivered by Leland Ryken on the student's calling and practical chapters on how to read, write, and speak well. Comprehensive in scope, this substantial volume will be a helpful guide to anyone involved in higher education, as well as to students, pastors, and leaders looking for resources on the importance of faith in learning.
How our colleges and universities can respond to the changing hopes and needs of society In recent decades, cognitive psychologists have cast new light on human development and given colleges new possibilities for helping students acquire skills and qualities that will enhance their lives and increase their contributions to society. In this landmark book, Derek Bok explores how colleges can reap the benefits of these discoveries and create a more robust undergraduate curriculum for the twenty-first century. Prior to this century, most psychologists thought that creativity, empathy, resilience, conscientiousness, and most personality traits were largely fixed by early childhood. What researchers have now discovered is that virtually all of these qualities continue to change through early adulthood and often well beyond. Such findings suggest that educators may be able to do much more than was previously thought possible to teach students to develop these important characteristics and thereby enable them to flourish in later life. How prepared are educators to cultivate these qualities of mind and behavior? What do they need to learn to capitalize on the possibilities? Will college faculties embrace these opportunities and make the necessary changes in their curricula and teaching methods? What can be done to hasten the process of innovation and application? In providing answers to these questions, Bok identifies the hurdles to institutional change, proposes sensible reforms, and demonstrates how our colleges can help students lead more successful, productive, and meaningful lives.
CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria argues for a renewed commitment to the world’s most valuable educational tradition. The liberal arts are under attack. The governors of Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have all pledged that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts, and they seem to have an unlikely ally in President Obama. While at a General Electric plant in early 2014, Obama remarked, "I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." These messages are hitting home: majors like English and history, once very popular and highly respected, are in steep decline. "I get it," writes Fareed Zakaria, recalling the atmosphere in India where he grew up, which was even more obsessed with getting a skills-based education. However, the CNN host and best-selling author explains why this widely held view is mistaken and shortsighted. Zakaria eloquently expounds on the virtues of a liberal arts education—how to write clearly, how to express yourself convincingly, and how to think analytically. He turns our leaders' vocational argument on its head. American routine manufacturing jobs continue to get automated or outsourced, and specific vocational knowledge is often outdated within a few years. Engineering is a great profession, but key value-added skills you will also need are creativity, lateral thinking, design, communication, storytelling, and, more than anything, the ability to continually learn and enjoy learning—precisely the gifts of a liberal education. Zakaria argues that technology is transforming education, opening up access to the best courses and classes in a vast variety of subjects for millions around the world. We are at the dawn of the greatest expansion of the idea of a liberal education in human history.
Liberal education aspires to excellence through the cultivation of free human beings who excel in thought, word, and deed. But what exactly is excellence, and why do we admire it? How do we conceive of what is excellent? What constitutes excellence—either for human beings, or in the realms of philosophy, literature, science, and politics? Why is excellence an aim of liberal education? What kinds of texts, courses, and inquiries contribute to achieving this end? Such questions animate the studies herein. The essays in this volume reflect on the idea of excellence embedded within core texts, as well as how such texts influence and ennoble higher education. In its chapters, we consider rival forms of excellence from ancient Greece and Rome, through modern Europe and America, and beyond. The world of antiquity and its accounts of excellence, as represented in the works of Euripides, Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, and Cicero, are here brought into dialogue with diverse modern perspectives on excellence, as articulated by Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Austen, Darwin, Lincoln, Tennyson, and Nietzsche, as well as (more recently) by John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Cardinal Newman, and Eboo Patel. Our desire to seek and understand excellence transcends borders, and the purpose of this volume is to help perpetuate in contemporary higher education the study of core texts essential to the cultivation of excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.
This "provocative and personally searching"memoir follows one mother's story of enrolling her daughter in a local public school (San Francisco Chronicle), and the surprising, necessary lessons she learned with her neighbors. From the time Courtney E. Martin strapped her daughter, Maya, to her chest for long walks, she was curious about Emerson Elementary, a public school down the street from her Oakland home. She learned that White families in their gentrifying neighborhood largely avoided the majority-Black, poorly-rated school. As she began asking why, a journey of a thousand moral miles began. Learning in Public is the story, not just Courtney’s journey, but a whole country’s. Many of us are newly awakened to the continuing racial injustice all around us, but unsure of how to go beyond hashtags and yard signs to be a part of transforming the country. Courtney discovers that her public school, the foundation of our fragile democracy, is a powerful place to dig deeper. Courtney E. Martin examines her own fears, assumptions, and conversations with other moms and dads as they navigate school choice. A vivid portrait of integration’s virtues and complexities, and yes, the palpable joy of trying to live differently in a country re-making itself. Learning in Public might also set your family’s life on a different course forever.
Having served as chancellor of the State University of New York, the United States commissioner of education, and president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Ernest L. Boyer (1928–1995) was one of the most prominent leaders in the history of American higher education. Arguably more aware of the challenges facing colleges and universities than any of his peers, the administrative decisions and the writings he left behind provide a wealth of possibilities for subsequent generations of administrators and faculty members. In this book noted higher education scholars examine some of the most pressing crises in higher education today, pairing their thoughts with relevant selections from Boyer's important writings—some published here for the first time. The volume provides answers to questions perceived to be plaguing academe, while reintroducing readers to the optimistic and insightful wisdom of Ernest L. Boyer.