Liberal Arts goes stateside for inaugural THE Liberal Arts Summit
Dr Bryan Brazeau, Head of Liberal Arts headed to Nashville earlier this month for the inaugural Liberal Arts Summit organised by Times Higher Education.
Focusing on Liberal Arts education and innovation in the digital age, the Summit - hosted in partnership with Vanderbilt University - gathered leading voices from higher education and other sectors to reimagine the future of liberal arts education in an increasingly digital world.
Delegates gained insights into a variety of topics, including how institutions teach and assess liberal arts worldwide, the power of international, cross-sector partnerships, practical strategies to harness the digital revolution, and the value of interdisciplinary approaches to elevate the relevance and influence of a liberal arts education.
On Day 2 of the Summit, Dr Bryan Brazeau joined Liberal Arts peers from the UK and America for a panel discussion exploring Career advancement and the Liberal Arts edge.The panel explored the ways in which liberal arts course providers can amplify and demonstrate the critical need for liberal arts courses in addressing employment challenges, thinking about how institutions can work productively with employers to highlight the value of a Liberal Arts education, and how we can dispel the myth that LA degrees are at times considered to be of lower value.
Brazeau commented:
“On the one hand, we need to move beyond the traditional stories we tell ourselves about the value of what we do. We can leverage our relationships with employers far more effectively by embedding employability skills directly into our teaching and the curriculum while also championing opportunities for internships, year-long placements, microcredentials, and certificates—such as those we offer in the School for Cross-Faculty Studies thanks to the work of our employability and placements manager Bodrun Nahar, and at the University of Warwick thanks to the Warwick Award.”
For Brazeau, the benefits of Liberal Arts Education are amplified by student-centred pedagogies such as problem-based and project-based learning — both of which can further empower students to develop the skills employers say they need from graduates: teamwork, leadership, creative problem solving, critical thinking, and metacognition.
He comments:
“We should be more prepared to draw on recent data and evidence—such as the excellent work of Milan Kovačević or Richard Detweiler— to showcase the benefits of Liberal Arts education; and work together to raise the profile of Liberal Education in both national and international contexts—underlining the importance of educational ecologies/contexts for holistic development.”
For Brazeau, an early modernist literary scholar by training, data is not enough to dispel myths — everything goes back to narrative and story, and he claims that we need to think in allegories and myths as well.
“On the other hand, I also think that we need to come together to create new stories. Dispelling the myths around a Liberal Arts degree won't simply happen with data and evidence, we need new myths and new stories to take their place.”
He suggested two images that might help us create these new stories:
1) The diamond/gemstone—which illustrates the observational skills Liberal Arts students have to both view the complexity of our world through multiple facets and to build meaning through interdisciplinary reflection and refraction.
2) Michelangelo's method "per levare" when sculpting—which frees pre-existing forms from within the stone, transforming a block of rejected marble into his famous David; or Keith Jarrett's transformation of a broken and out-of-tune piano at his famous 1975 Köln concert; or a gearbox/transmission. Liberal Artists are experts at adapting critically and creatively to emergent and imperfect conditions, messy materials, & complex contexts.
Brazeau hopes to develop these insights into a publication and as part of a new advanced undergraduate module that interrogates the origins, tradition, and value of a Liberal Arts education in the twenty-first century.
You can find out more about the Summit here.