First of all, thanks to everyone who reads Delicious Ambiguity for putting up with a three-part series of posts. Somehow it seems to me like it requires an extra dose of ego to think that any idea is so big or important that it deserves three separate posts, so I feel sort of sheepish for even trying to pull it off. More likely, this endeavor could just mean that I’m so damn long-winded that I can’t say anything of substance within my self-imposed word limit.
With that said, this is the “refining” post and is to be the last of the three-part bit I promised on reframing, refocusing, and refining the way that we operationalize the liberal arts. Partly because I’m late with this post and partly because it would be ironic to write a painfully long post about the act of refining, I’m going to make an extra effort to be concise.
I think that we should refine the way that we deliver the liberal arts because the quality of any educator’s effort (i.e., the degree to which an educator influences learning) can’t be separated from the amount of time that an educator has to dedicate to this effort. We know that helping students develop the skills and dispositions necessary to succeed in life requires substantial personal interaction. Over the last decade, it appears that we’ve become a very busy college. We’ve added a host of legitimate educational and administrative responsibilities at every level, revamped programs and curricula, and seem to constantly on the brink of deciding to change something big. Yet we have taken very little away even as we’ve taken on all of these entirely defensible programs, pedagogies, and policies. During the last twelve months of strategic planning discussions, the question that many raised, “But what are we going to take away?” seemed sometimes to be as much a lament as it was a serious question.
So I offer a set of findings from one part of last year’s senior survey and a few musing on some potential implications of these findings in the hope that it will at least fuel continued discussion of the things that we should take away. I know there will always be some who are personally vested in the things that we might decide to take away, but (1) if we are ultimately about the experience of the students, and (2) we know that our ability to provide the best learning experience for students requires us to be efficient in the time we allot to each educational aspect of that experience, then we have to be brave enough as a community to make these choices.
Last spring, after the faculty had approved our college-wide learning outcomes earlier in the fall, I thought it might be useful to get some sort of baseline sense of where students think they develop these skills – not as evidence of where they actually gain these skills, but rather some reflection of the degree to which the experience we offer is as holistic as we’d like to think it is. Thus, I inserted a set of questions in the senior survey that asked students to identify the experiences where they think they developed each of these learning outcomes. For each learning outcome, students were given a list of college experiences and were allow to choose as many as applied. Here are the results.
| Disciplinary Knowledge | |
| Major(s) or Minor(s) Courses | 93.7% |
| General Education Courses (AGES) | 45.9% |
| Augie Choice Programs (Study Abroad, Internship, or Undergraduate Research) | 45.9% |
| Residence Life Experience | 11.3% |
| Participation in Student Organizations and Clubs | 28.5% |
| Working On or Off Campus | 29.5% |
| Informal Interactions with Faculty and Staff | 34.3% |
| Informal Interactions with Peers | 25.4% |
| Volunteering in the Community | 19.8% |
| Senior Inquiry | 55.6% |
| None of the Above | 0.4% |
| Critical Thinking and Information Literacy | |
| Major(s) or Minor(s) Courses | 91.3% |
| General Education Courses (AGES) | 58.4% |
| Augie Choice Programs (Study Abroad, Internship, or Undergraduate Research) | 36.4% |
| Residence Life Experience | 10.7% |
| Participation in Student Organizations and Clubs | 23.0% |
| Working On or Off Campus | 25.9% |
| Informal Interactions with Faculty and Staff | 29.7% |
| Informal Interactions with Peers | 26.7% |
| Volunteering in the Community | 11.9% |
| Senior Inquiry | 57.8% |
| None of the Above | 0.4% |
| Quantitative Literacy | |
| Major(s) or Minor(s) Courses | 77.6% |
| General Education Courses (AGES) | 50.5% |
| Augie Choice Programs (Study Abroad, Internship, or Undergraduate Research) | 15.2% |
| Residence Life Experience | 3.2% |
| Participation in Student Organizations and Clubs | 8.7% |
| Working On or Off Campus | 16.0% |
| Informal Interactions with Faculty and Staff | 10.9% |
| Informal Interactions with Peers | 8.1% |
| Volunteering in the Community | 3.4% |
| Senior Inquiry | 39.0% |
| None of the Above | 3.4% |
| Collaborative Leadership | |
| Major(s) or Minor(s) Courses | 62.0% |
| General Education Courses (AGES) | 33.1% |
| Augie Choice Programs (Study Abroad, Internship, or Undergraduate Research) | 37.4% |
| Residence Life Experience | 27.3% |
| Participation in Student Organizations and Clubs | 65.5% |
| Working On or Off Campus | 46.7% |
| Informal Interactions with Faculty and Staff | 29.9% |
| Informal Interactions with Peers | 43.2% |
| Volunteering in the Community | 40.0% |
| Senior Inquiry | 24.6% |
| None of the Above | 1.4% |
| Intercultural Competency | |
| Major(s) or Minor(s) Courses | 47.1% |
| General Education Courses (AGES) | 48.5% |
| Augie Choice Programs (Study Abroad, Internship, or Undergraduate Research) | 46.9% |
| Residence Life Experience | 26.5% |
| Participation in Student Organizations and Clubs | 38.6% |
| Working On or Off Campus | 27.9% |
| Informal Interactions with Faculty and Staff | 19.0% |
| Informal Interactions with Peers | 40.0% |
| Volunteering in the Community | 37.0% |
| Senior Inquiry | 17.2% |
| None of the Above | 5.1% |
| Communication Competency | |
| Major(s) or Minor(s) Courses | 84.4% |
| General Education Courses (AGES) | 60.6% |
| Augie Choice Programs (Study Abroad, Internship, or Undergraduate Research) | 41.4% |
| Residence Life Experience | 20.2% |
| Participation in Student Organizations and Clubs | 41.6% |
| Working On or Off Campus | 35.2% |
| Informal Interactions with Faculty and Staff | 40.2% |
| Informal Interactions with Peers | 37.2% |
| Volunteering in the Community | 22.4% |
| Senior Inquiry | 51.3% |
| None of the Above | 1.2% |
| Creative Thinking | |
| Major(s) or Minor(s) Courses | 79.6% |
| General Education Courses (AGES) | 59.2% |
| Augie Choice Programs (Study Abroad, Internship, or Undergraduate Research) | 36.6% |
| Residence Life Experience | 13.3% |
| Participation in Student Organizations and Clubs | 36.6% |
| Working On or Off Campus | 26.1% |
| Informal Interactions with Faculty and Staff | 23.0% |
| Informal Interactions with Peers | 27.1% |
| Volunteering in the Community | 17.4% |
| Senior Inquiry | 49.3% |
| None of the Above | 2.6% |
| Ethical Citizenship | |
| Major(s) or Minor(s) Courses | 59.4% |
| General Education Courses (AGES) | 45.7% |
| Augie Choice Programs (Study Abroad, Internship, or Undergraduate Research) | 40.8% |
| Residence Life Experience | 25.5% |
| Participation in Student Organizations and Clubs | 42.0% |
| Working On or Off Campus | 36.6% |
| Informal Interactions with Faculty and Staff | 31.9% |
| Informal Interactions with Peers | 39.6% |
| Volunteering in the Community | 42.6% |
| Senior Inquiry | 26.1% |
| None of the Above | 4.8% |
| Intellectual Curiosity | |
| Major(s) or Minor(s) Courses | 87.1% |
| General Education Courses (AGES) | 59.2% |
| Augie Choice Programs (Study Abroad, Internship, or Undergraduate Research) | 49.5% |
| Residence Life Experience | 9.3% |
| Participation in Student Organizations and Clubs | 27.7% |
| Working On or Off Campus | 23.6% |
| Informal Interactions with Faculty and Staff | 42.0% |
| Informal Interactions with Peers | 34.9% |
| Volunteering in the Community | 19.8% |
| Senior Inquiry | 51.1% |
| None of the Above | 2.2% |
To some degree, the implications of these findings may lie in the eye of the beholder. But what jumps out to me is the degree to which major and minor courses seem to do so much of the heavy lifting. If this is really so, then it is no wonder that faculty would be pressed for time to do much else besides teach students. However, if we would like to create a more holistic educational experience and do so in a way that allows all of us to be equally involved in the development of our students, then there might be some logic in considering ways for faculty to pass on some of the responsibilities of learning in specific areas.
But another way to read this data is to consider the degree to which students don’t indicate experiences outside of the academic realm more often. And this might be a more useful way to think about designing a comprehensive college experience that is more effective and more efficient. In an odd way, we might find that the refinement we need to consider is not that the responsibility for students’ learning across each of the learning outcomes is distributed more exclusively among individual experiences, but rather that each of us explicitly understands our role in contributing (1) a small but crucial building block to students’ development and (2) the sinew that connects that building block to another block that can only be gained through a different experience offered elsewhere on our campus (or an off-campus experience facilitated by someone on campus).
Someone once said that planning to do something is the easy part; the hard part was actually doing it. I suspect for us this will also be true. The strategic planning was the easy part. The hard part will be implementing this plan in a way that accomplishes the learning goals and student success to which we aspire.
So let’s roll up our sleeves. We’ve got work to do.
Make it a good day,
Mark