Personal Reflection on Managing, Learning and Liberal Arts

Personal Reflection on Managing, Learning and Liberal Arts

Introduction

At a time when many students view the liberal arts as dated and a broad education as a luxury, many colleges and universities find themselves drawn toward the sole purpose of pre-professional education. Can liberal arts institutions responsibly profess a way of learning and living that reflects our narrowing responses to culturally driven and collective fantasies of professional and economic identity and success? Is the shaping of identity more than a collective march up the steppingstones to career and profession? Or is identity in liberal arts today a political statement, oversimplifying creative possibilities for engaging points of convergence as well as difference? Sullivan's challenge is thick and complex indeed. Identity is personal, political, local, and global. How do these multiple faces become expressions of the purposes and responsibilities of liberal arts education? In this paper, I discuss my personal experiences about managing, learning and liberal arts in a concise and comprehensive way.

Managing, Learning and Liberal Arts: Personal Reflection

We will explore these issues through the Theory Practice Learning Program (TPL) at Emory University. TPL is an experientially based pedagogy designed to integrate theory with practice. It enables students and faculty to look at their disciplines and put them into a larger context of learning that includes developmental, ethical, relational, and communal issues and questions (Eyler and Giles, 1998). We contend that for students to address who they are and what they can get from their education, they must engage the full spectrum of learning in its larger contexts. Students and their teachers must grapple with questions of identity and responsibility within the liberal arts paradigm of theoretical study, critical thinking, and ethical reflection. The goal of TPL is to expand this paradigm through partnerships between higher education and communities. In this article, we explore how TPL internships help liberal arts students discover more deeply the purposes and responsibilities of their studies, their identities and roles as liberal learners, and the intentions of their college degrees.

Let me begin with absolute clarity: I love being a student. I love that my job is to read great literature and tell people what I think. I love that a lunchtime conversation can range from Austrian politics, to the latest film, to the strange noise in the dorm the night before. I even love sitting in an astronomy class (a subject matter far from my own expertise) and leaving with a feeling of insignificance against the vastness of the universe. I adore all these aspects of my liberal arts education. Yet that said, whenever I tell people (quite proudly) my major, I receive almost the same response every time: "Oh, English ... how nice for you. So what do you really want to do?" I have constructed many possible responses to stave off further inquiry (one of the more amusing options concerns a hot-dog stand in Central America), but the question points to the heart of what liberal arts students face every day: ...