Liberal Arts Education for Digital Natives

Thank you sincerely to those who participated in the first post to this blog. Even though we are on to another topic, please feel free to revisit the first post and continue the conversations you're having there. Some time in January, we will be interpreting and analyzing them in an attempt to distill the perspectives into a foundational point of entry to a new brainstorm of practical and practiceable reforms.

In this new post, I invite English Studies colleagues to share their views on the apparent digital divide. Please see this 2008 article by Bennet, Maton, and Kervin to give some context to the discussion. From the Zakaria article in the previous post, and from many of your contributions, there remains a widely held recognition that writing remains core to a liberal arts education and to our English Studies program. Despite the growing digital universe of multi-modal communication and idea delivery, we maintain that essay writing is still the ultimate intellectual exercise of identifying, understanding, exploring, and propelling an idea. However, this intellectual tradition is a risk of being misunderstood in a world of competing forms of more dynamic communication and discourses.

Personally speaking, I constantly struggle with how to effectively reinforce this tradition that requires time and care and contemplation with a generation of students who inhabit a world that is instant and scattered and changing. From my conversations around the office, I am not alone.

So this leads me to the following general inquiries for this post. We are now seeing a generation of students entering our program who have never known a world without the internet. They are digital natives. And for the most part, they are being taught by a generation of teachers who had to learn and to adapt to the digital revolution, in some cases very reluctantly. They are digital immigrants. To what extent is there a tension here? To what extent should students need to bend to the traditions many of us hold dear? And to what extent should many of us teachers bend to the digital realities of the day? And another thought: Within the next ten years, we will see our faculty become more composed of digital natives, so what kind of program and pedagogy can we envision then?

Do not feel compelled to answer all of these questions. They are just prompts for discussion. Please try to contribute before the end of December. Thank you so much as always.

English Studies and a Liberal Education

Welcome everyone to this first discussion about the future of our EC program. One intention of this blog is to provide a forum that allows for asynchronous discussion so that you can participate on your own time. That said, there is an expectation (a hope) that everyone will participate in this fundamental review of who we are as a program, where we are lagging, and where we hope to go.

Some ground rules:

• This is not a forum for cynicism. Keep it optimistic and forward-thinking.

• Respond to one another with rigor, but keep it respectful in a spirit of goodwill.

• Keep your posts brief. You may post frequently, but keep them short and readable.

Over the past year, the idea of a liberal arts education at MUIC has come into question. The college continues to espouse the values of a liberal arts education as published on the website. It reads in part that MUIC's curricular programs are "designed to instill not only analytic and critical thinking skills but also creativity, problem-solving and research skills." We have always seen the English Studies General Education program to be foundational for developing these qualities in the intent that they transfer to the competencies required in the students' major programs, and more broadly in their lives.

While these aims of instilling critical thinking and creativity remain core to our EC program, we are experiencing inertia. There is a sense that society and culture are passing us by. We are no longer ahead of the curve. Many of us believe we must become more techno-saavy, and that we must move to more flipped classroom models. Our students now are different from our students ten years ago when the last major curriculum review was carried out. At that time, smart technologies were only just coming into the culture, and no one could foresee the level of integration they have had in our lives, and the extent to which they affect our students.

We may argue later about the extent to which technology or other applications must change the way we do things in the EC program. However, to begin this review I ask that we revisit the idea of a liberal education, and how we see the role of English Studies in MUIC fundamentally. Attached here is a chapter from Fareed Zakaria's 2015 book, A Defense of a Liberal Education. I encourage us all to read it, and meanwhile reflect on our classes and our students. 

The question for reflection on this blog is simple. What are the ultimate aims of the EC program? This includes how we see ourselves in relation to the rest of the college as a GE program. Please feel free to expand on why or how you see these aims as crucial to our students' educational experience at MUIC. This discussion will be open until the end of October.