Washington, DC—January 22, 2015—The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) opened its Centennial Annual Meeting looking to the future.
Marking its 100th year of leadership for liberal education and ten years of educational reform and advocacy through its groundbreaking national initiative, Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), AAC&U today launched the next phase of LEAP with a bold national challenge to higher education to prepare all college students to produce “Signature Work”—a project related to a problem important to the student and to society.
AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider told the 2,000 educational leaders who gathered for AAC&U’s Centennial Annual Meeting that the “challenge of our time is to ensure that all college students are well-prepared to tackle unscripted problems with the broad knowledge and cross-cutting skills that will help them flourish in today’s world. We need to redesign our curricular pathways so that all students—at two and four-year colleges alike—experience multiple, high-impact assignments and projects that prepare them to integrate and apply their learning to complex questions and problems. Students’ “Signature Work” should become the new marker of quality in higher education.”
As it issues its LEAP Challenge, AAC&U also premiered today a Centennial Video featuring the power of an engaged, public-spirited liberal education to transform students’ lives and address the “big questions.” Featuring the voices of educators, business leaders, and students at AAC&U member institutions, the video shines a spotlight on a 21st-century liberal education and how “signature work” can help all students develop the capacities they need for future success and leadership. Go to www.aacu.org/centennial/video to view AAC&U’s Centennial Video.
George D. Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor of Higher Education Emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington and member of the LEAP National Leadership Council declared: “The point of a liberating education is to prepare students to deal effectively with complexity, diversity, and dynamic change. Given economic and global trends and challenges, postsecondary institutions must equip students to analyze and use evidence to tackle complex questions in an ethical manner to reach their own positions on those questions.”
Oh, Yes. But/and, please consider the Liberal Arts’ unique contribution, as our ‘European Charter’ declared:
`What have the Humanities to Offer 21st-Century Europe?’ Arts and Humanities in Higher Education vol. 7 no. 1 83-96 2008 http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/7/1/83.abstract
The Humanities have much to offer 21st-century Europe, in terms of both method and issues which may complement and correct those of Science and Social Science. These include, for instance, humanities’ generation of plural narratives and plural explanations, of attention to singularity and complexity, and to others’ sensibilities and ways of knowing. Our disciplines provide higher order skills needed to engage and engage with the New Europe — rhetorical and communication skills, networked knowledge sharing, responsive and responsible citizenship. In interdisciplinary partnership with `hard’ science research, the Humanities can offer ways of dealing with particularity and imagination, with issues of identity and sensibility, with encountering the other. At the same time, the humanities’ own complex interpretative narratives and ability to generate and cope with complexity are vitalizing and enabling in a fearful and supercomplex world.