LIBERAL LEARNING AND THE ARTS OF CONNECTION FOR THE NEW ACADEMY
Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Scribe

Foreword by Carol Geary Schneider

Note to Reader:
These selections have been adapted from the original mss (AAC&U 1995). for this website. The full copy of this report from AAC&U's American Commitments National Panel can be ordered from the Association of American Colleges and Universities .

From the Foreward:
This report from AAC&U's American Commitments initiative explores the connections among diversity, democratic aspirations and goals for student learning in higher education. Drawing on new fields and emphases in contemporary scholarship, it points high er education toward the learning we need in a world of extraordinary heterogeneity

Around the country, those who see integral connections between the future of higher education and the future of our society have been calling on the academy to reinvent itself. The promising message of this report is that the renewal we need is already u nder way. An old era is coming to a close; a new vision of the intimate connections between higher learning and the quality of human community is coming clearly into view.

The academy has always placed education for civic responsibility at the core of its educational mission. Liberal Learning and the Arts of Connection for a New Academy challenges us to think in fresh terms about the meaning of that commitment. What kind of learning helps prepare students to assume responsibility and leadership in a democracy characterized by diversity and marred by persistent and invidious inequalities? How do we move beyond the dichotomized thinking that frustrates contemporary efforts to describe and advance a generative pluralism? What are the connections between studying justice and creating a more just society for all participants?

Writing on behalf of the National Panel guiding AAC&U's American Commitments initiative, scribe Elizabeth Minnich observes that a 'new academy' is growing up around the edges - and increasingly within the departments - of the 'old' academy. This new acad emy explores and gives voice to communities that traditionally have had no role or marginalized roles on our campuses. It welcomes rather than avoids critical and creative engagement with wider communities. It endorses and produces scholarship that see ks not just to know the world but to work toward a better world.

Scholars and teachers in this emergent 'new academy' are pioneering ways of thinking, learning and teaching that provide models for engaging differences constructively, rather than divisively. In their work, 'diversity' is not simply new subject matter, although the new academy has contributed in stunning ways to the expansion and reconfiguration of knowledge. Diversity calls for new capacities, new ways of thinking and acting and relating. This report describes those capacities and the kinds of learnin g that develop them. It encourages us to move beyond the so-called culture wars to a new era in which all of us learn better how to make a world in which everyone is heard and everyone counts.

Liberal Learning and Arts of Connection for the New Academy

From the Synopsis....
Diversity has been cast as a problem for both democracy and liberal education. This framing tells us that prevailing conceptions of democracy, of education, and of their relations are not serving us well. What kind of democracy, what kind of education, cannot deal with given and historical differences among humankind? We believe our diversities, from the benign to the most viciously inequitable, are resources for liberal learning in a nation with aspirations to democracy. What we do not know we can nei ther celebrate nor face and change, either on campus or in what ought to be our common civic life.

A 'new academy' has already appeared on our campuses. It comprises ways of thinking, reconfigurations of disciplines, new modes of teaching and assessment, and new forms of scholarship. All of these have developed precisely in order to move beyond histo rically inequitable divisions among us.

We therefore bring some of what may be learned from the new academy into conversation with prevailing traditions. Such conversation brings forward for serious discussion some of the basic issues before us today. They include:

• issues of inclusion/exclusion of 'kinds' of people, as citizens and as learners, teachers, and subjects in liberal education;
• issues of the relations among individuals, communities, societies, cultures, and polities taught about and practiced in education;
• issues of the historical, social, cultural, and political contexts of knowledge creation and preservation;
• issues of how we may, and why we should, search for more inclusive and equitable common grounds.

Drawing on the rich mine of work already available and still developing on such issues in virtually all fields, we present for discussion some shifts in concepts and ways of thinking. We focus on the reframing of thinking and related reconfigurations of l iberal arts. We are looking for ways to open spaces for more relational thinking, and for more inclusive courses, teaching, scholarship, and action.

From Chapter Four....

A Renewal of Educational Commitments

Democracy. . .is a community always in the making. If educators hold this in mind, they will remember that democracy is forever incomplete: it is founded in possibilities. Even in the small, the local places in which teaching is done, educators may begi n creating the kinds of situations where, at the very least, students will begin telling the stories of what they are seeking, what they know and might not yet know, exchanging stories with others grounded in other landscapes, at once bringing something i nto being that is in-between. . . .It is at moments like these that persons begin to recognize each other and, in the experience of recognition, feel the need to take responsibility for each other.

--Maxine Greene

It is time to reframe and renew our commitments as educators for a democracy 'still in the making,' to address historically developed diversities, human differences, relations, and change. We call, therefore, for the following five interrelated educationa l commitments:

• an exploration of grounded selves, enabled by understanding of self and others, to enter into
• relational pluralism, pluralism redefined, reassessed and given meaning and particular purpose by
• contextualized knowing and knowledge, that informs developing capacities for
• mutually respectful dialogues among cultures and multiple meaning systems, in the context and for the sake of
• fully participatory democracies.

These are proposed as suggestive themes for liberal education, emphases that help us continue practicing arts of thinking and living together. In different times, there were other framings of the liberal arts. Our framings, too, are particular, historical, evolving.

Conclusion

Democratic Liberal Learning

Liberal learning today as always involves positions on what counts as knowledge, what it means to be human, what social orders are and should be. Thus, today's active, multivocal discussions about the meanings of the liberal arts and their realization through curricula, pedagogies, and institutional structures matter. They are about books and subjects, yes, and they are also about ideals in tension with entrenched realities of power. That is why as educators we must care about racism and racialization, sexism, homophobia, class barriers, anti-Semitism, and all other expressions of the failures of aspirational democracy. These are failures of mind as mu ch as they are failures of heart. They have infected epistemologies as well as practices of justice, because what we think and think we know has everything to do with the ways we make judgments and choices, the ways we act, and the systems we establish. What counts as literature, art, philosophy, music, science, and what is considered insignificant or unsound is decided in those systems, by those epistemologies. Who speaks and who is not heard; what is studied and what is neglected; who is supported and who is devalued as a result of such decisions and practices affect the future of this country as it continues to be shaped by and to shape its educational institutions.

Where discussion and exploration among many is not only welcomed but centrally valued in a democratic spirit, no particular substantive positions can be established as unchallengeable beforehand. Despite our endorsement of developments in contemporary sc holarship and teaching, we continue to believe that there is no one correct, timeless definition of the liberal arts.

What we are proposing is that liberal learning for our moment in history is specifically challenged to help us learn how to cross borders and boundary lands, how to work across and with the resources of all our differences in our immediate as well as most extensive contexts. This is a challenge that has already proven its profound and exciting significance in reconfiguring liberal learning. How it will develop and change remains to be seen--and is up to all of us, and those who join and succeed us.

As we move on and off, around and through our changing, less insular campuses on both established and newer paths made by our many colleagues and students, we are being challenged to learn how to sustain multiple and even competing commitments. To do so, we are called to develop our own value systems while honoring those of others, and--difficult as it is--to practice making consequential choices while recognizing significant disagreements. There are no guarantees that we will, in our differing ways, me et these challenges well, or even that we will ever agree on just what they are. But liberal education and the liberal arts today have already changed. They are no longer the preserve of a privileged few. They are also already more than the competitive marketplace of unrelated courses which educational leaders have decried for nearly two decades.

As we reconfigure what constitutes liberal education and strive for greater inclusiveness and equity, we generate new resources for once again engaging, for our times, crucial questions about how we are to live and learn together. It is these questions, and the responses being made to them in the new academy, that are shaping a liberal education for which diversity is indeed a resource, no t a problem.

Let us, then, continue to discuss together how we can

• be reflective about ways of thinking that do and do not help us move beyond old divisions, oppositions, and hierarchies;
• include the subjects and competencies of the new academy as they help us reconfigure the liberal arts in order to engage them more fully with the quest for an open, common civic life;
• purposefully seek to develop the arts of translation, the abilities, commitments, and knowledges required to move respectfully among subjects and fields, individuals, communities, cultures, and nations;
• practice with our students and colleagues democratic arts of associative living, acting, and learning;
• make more permeable in both directions the boundaries between "town" and "gown";
• teach and structure our institutions so that we and our students become both more grounded and able fully to recognize each other so that we may welcome our mutual responsibilities to each other and the world we share;
• and through such efforts, continue to try to live up to our claim that liberal education has as one of its fundamental purposes preparing students for lives as active citizens in a country still aspiring to democracy in an increasingly interdependent but hardly yet equitable world.

Please see our overview of the American Commitments Initiative. In addition to American Pluralism and the College Curriculum, the American Commitments National Panel has produced several panel reports, including: American Pluralism and the College Curriculum. The Initiative also created Community Seminars on Diversity and Democracy. Please see The Association of American Colleges and Universities for information about other AAC&U diversity initiatives.