Jon Cheek, Founder of UniTasterDays >> Hello and welcome to this UniTaster on-demand event today, where we're going to be exploring university courses in Liberal Arts. My name is Jon Cheek, I'm here from UniTasterDays. It's my job to host the event and this is a collaborative event. So, what do we mean by that? It means that we will be joined by three speakers from three different universities, all of whom are experts in the Liberal Arts subject area. We're joined by Dr Kirsten Harris from the University of Warwick and Kirsten is going to open things up for us, then pass to Dr Simon Scott joining us from the University of Birmingham, and then last but not least to Dr Scott Midson joining us from the University of Manchester, before we actually pass things over to Kirsten again to finish the session off with some personal statement and application tips right at the end as well.

In terms of what we're going to cover, I mentioned right at the start that we're looking at Liberal Arts today, and the content checklist you can see on the slide just here (0:53), just so you know what to look out for and when. With that I'm going to pass things over to Dr Kirsten Harris joining us from the University of Warwick - Kirsten over to you.

Dr Kirsten Harris >> Well, hi and thanks for joining us today. Myself, Simon, and Scott are really excited to introduce to you a little bit about Liberal Arts degrees and what studying in this kind of way is all about. Today's session is going to look like this: first of all we're going to talk a little bit about what Liberal Arts actually is, then we're going to talk about one of the key principles of Liberal Arts which is interdisciplinarity, then we're going to talk about what this kind of teaching and education can bring in terms of independent learning. We're going to talk a little bit about the kind of skills and attributes that you get out of a Liberal Arts degree

and what that means in terms of employability, and then we're going to give you a little bit of advice about how to go about applying to Liberal Arts programmes.

So, what is Liberal Arts? This is the question that I start off asking and answering when I give talks at university open days and other similar events, because it's a degree that a lot of people haven't come across before necessarily, though it's a degree that's really gaining in popularity in the UK. As it's not a subject that's studied in school and it's not a subject in the traditional sense like Sociology or English Literature, some people are perhaps unfamiliar with it. Firstly, Liberal Arts doesn't refer to the arts as in the creative arts, instead it's art as in skill. So, the art of cooking, the art of riding a bike. The 'liberal' bit refers to ideas about liberty and freedom. And so Liberal Arts essentially comes from a very old idea that the point of education is to develop the skills and knowledge that you need to function as free citizens. Now, the way that this is understood has changed over time, both our understanding of what free citizenship might look like and also our understanding of the best kind of education that you need to achieve this.

You should also be aware that Liberal Arts degrees in the UK often look very different to those offered in the United States or elsewhere in Europe. Even here in the United Kingdom, the way that different universities interpret this idea of education for citizenship differs from institution to institution. Broadly speaking, Liberal Arts courses tend to consist of on the one hand modules that you take in Liberal Arts departments which are interdisciplinary and we'll talk a bit more about what that means in a little bit, but then a large portion of your degree will be open for you to take different modules across different departments around the university. In Liberal Arts degrees you're really building your own degree across a whole range of subjects, you're adding breadth to your studies, but you're not sacrificing depth, and we're going to talk to you a little bit more about that today.

Dr Simon Scott, University of Birmingham >> Let's take two students, one of them is taking a Politics degree for example, and one of them is taking a Liberal Arts degree. Let's say these two students have three hours of classes on a Monday. Now the first student spends all three hours, indeed all three years, studying Politics and they become very good at recognising political problems and at drawing upon their knowledge to work out how those problems might be solved. So framing things in a political way and knowing what political resources are available for finding solutions. That's how we get experts and experts’ advanced knowledge, and that's why universities traditionally have been organised around specialisms. The problem for this student is that by only studying Politics, they're educated to recognise only political problems, so they can only find political solutions. You can view a problem from one perspective but it's unlikely that the problem can only be viewed from that perspective. What if this political problem is also a social problem, an economic problem and a cultural problem? And the issue here is that we tend to think that when we find a solution, the problem goes away, but that's rarely the case. The problem has been solved in so far as we've understood it. This begins to answer the question: why are universities increasingly embracing interdisciplinarity and Liberal Arts programmes?

To answer that question fully, let's look at our second student who's taking a Liberal Arts degree. Maybe on a Monday they're going for example, from a Politics lecture to a History of Art seminar and then on to an Anthropology class. The Liberal Arts student is learning to think in different ways and it's a bit like becoming fluent in different languages. Each of these subjects uses different kinds of knowledge, different methods of research, different ways of making an argument, and using different kinds of evidence to prove a point. You're exercising a much greater range of skills, you're thinking differently in each of these classes and you're viewing the world through a different lens. Perspective is key and the ability to take different perspectives is really important for Liberal Arts programmes. However, Liberal Arts programmes go beyond this, because interdisciplinarity is central to them - you might have come across this word before. Interdisciplinarity is a research process that brings two or more subjects or disciplines together, for example to understand something holistically in a way that couldn't be done within a single discipline. But more than this, interdisciplinarity integrates two or more disciplines to create something new, it's not just a question of learning and repeating what others have said, but creating new knowledge. It's a matter of innovation, it's a matter of seeing the world differently from a new perspective. Think about the topics that interest you, the questions you're passionate about answering, the issues in the world that you find yourself coming back to time and time again. Can these topics and questions be confined to a single discipline, or do your interests cross disciplinary borders?

Increasingly, these are the kind of complex questions and problems that we face in the world. For example, we might look at climate change, sustainability, artificial intelligence, or reproductive engineering and consider what impact they have on government, society, culture, the economy, education, relationships and well-being. To understand topics in their complexity we cannot for example, reduce them to a political problem. We need to take different perspectives, and it's not enough to bring different experts together, we also need people who have the mental agility to cross disciplines, people who can bring insights together from different disciplines to create new knowledge. To a cynical ear, it might sound like we're talking about a pick-and-mix degree - you do a bit of history, a bit of culture studies, a bit of international relations, and you graduate with the insights of a tourist - but that's simply not true. As Kirsten said Liberal Arts degrees allow depth as well as breadth of knowledge, and you can invest more time in the disciplines that interest you most.

In most degrees the questions you ask and answer are determined by what you study, and we saw this earlier with our example of the first student who can only ask questions about politics. In a Liberal Arts degree, what you study is limited only by what you're interested in. The questions you ask are not confined to a single discipline, you do not have to be an expert in a discipline to engage with it. You use the interdisciplinary research process to familiarise yourself with the different disciplines and then use the advanced skills involved in integrating them - that is a very rigorous process that has depth as well as breadth.

I want to make two final points, first as a Liberal Arts student you have more choice about what you study, that means you have more responsibility for your education. We want you to make the right choices, we want to help you reflect on your interests, so Liberal Arts programmes tend to have a more engaged personal tutoring system. A personal tutor is someone who supports you through your education academically, but can also be someone you speak to about personal issues. Your personal tutor is an academic that you meet with each term, who you can ask questions and who provides advice, so you aren't thrown in at the deep end and have to figure things out for yourself.

Finally, I hope you can appreciate the many benefits of this kind of education, but let me end this section of the talk by focusing on one. You're thinking about going to university and you're being asked to decide what you want to study in three or four years time, and you haven't even finished school or college yet, so how do you know what you're going to be interested in in four or five years time? Imagine going the other way, if you had had to decide four or five years ago the subjects that you're studying right now, how could you know then what you're interested in now? Interdisciplinarity by its nature, is flexible, and a flexible degree is one that allows your interests to change, to evolve. If you apply to a Liberal Arts degree it means that the decisions you make now and at the start of your degree will not limit what you can be interested in over the coming years, you do not have to limit your possibilities.

Dr Scott Midson, University of Manchester >> As you can see, Liberal Arts is a degree like no other, it gives you unrivalled scope to tailor your degree around your own interests. And because of the way that the Liberal Arts degree is formed and allows you to bring out your own interests, it highlights the particular skill set that we bring through in various forms of teaching, and that's what I'm going to focus on in my part of this talk.

Just picking up on what Simon and Kirsten have already said, Liberal Arts is not a subject in itself, it's a very different type of degree programme. It's more an approach to thinking about big issues that don't necessarily sit within any particular discipline or subject, such as history or sociology for example, it straddles a lot of disciplinary boundaries. Part of the way that we teach that interdisciplinarity on your programme will be a mix of bespoke Liberal Arts units. These are core units that give you a skillset in handling diverse ideas from a range of different disciplines and being able to know what your own interests and passions are and to be able to take those further in your studies. You'll also be supported to take additional modules typically from a range of different departments, schools and faculties across your university, and the combination of the two gives you a lot of flexibility and freedom to really make your degree what you want to - we encourage you to bring your passion, your interests and your enthusiasm to your Liberal Arts programme.

One of the skills that Liberal Arts encourages, because of the emphasis on your own interest in carving your own research pathway and indeed shaping you as an active researcher, is to help you to develop your own research questions out of your own interests and these interdisciplinary insights. Typically in your first year of a Liberal Arts programme you will encounter different research methodologies that span a range of arts and social science and even scientific traditions. These will help you to understand how to ask, if you like, the right questions about the different things that you're interested in, how to sieve through a huge mass and wealth of information and different types of sources. It will also help you to ask what it is that you're interested in in the first place, and all Liberal Arts students will have a lot of support with personal tutors, academic advisors to help you to not only discover what interests you have, and how to realise them on your programme, but also how to make the most of the opportunities that your university provides you.

On Liberal Arts core modules, as well as methodologies, you'll also learn how to navigate different fields of insight and how to develop your own research agenda. You might be working with colleagues, with fellow students that are researching hugely diverse topics, that are massively different from your own, be that climate change, artificial intelligence, inequalities in the city, but what will unite these different projects is a focus on the skills and the methodologies in order to encounter and tackle these cross-disciplinary issues. Part of how we recognise this skill set in a Liberal Arts programme is by teaching you to not only be an independent researcher and to recognise your own strengths and your own interests, but also how to reflect on these interests and how to make the most of those opportunities, and we also encourage you to be innovative and creative in the ways that you respond to different challenges, forging new links across ideas and disciplines and indeed forging links across universities and the public as well. And this sort of takes the form of collaboration, not only with fellow students but also with perhaps external partners, which is frequently a part of Liberal Arts programmes.

In terms of how all these skills are taught, there's typically an emphasis in Liberal Arts core modules on seminars and on active learning, what we call a ‘flipped classroom’ where there's a strong emphasis on conversations and your own ideas that you share with peers. There's also likely to be workshops and hands-on experiences with different types of sources - different museum archives, different collections, and different types of sources as well including artworks and music and images.

All of these different types of sources and ideas that you might encounter are assessed in a range of equally innovative ways, so you'll typically be guided on your Liberal Arts programmes to not only write your own research essays and to demonstrate your interdisciplinary researcher skillset, but also to think outside the box. Liberal Arts modules will typically and commonly encourage you to design posters, to design podcasts, to make portfolios - creative portfolios, that showcase a range of skills and a range of different ideas that you bring to the problems that really excite and enthuse you.

Dr Kirsten Harris >> We know that the question of employability is one that concerns many students and also parents and guardians, and an interdisciplinary Liberal Arts degree really does give students an edge in this regard, because they develop a unique set of skills that are in addition to and go beyond the standard set of transferable skills that students taking a more traditional degree in the arts, humanities or social sciences might have. You do get that standard set of skills and things like communication, research, doing presentations, all that kind of thing, but then the unusual way that you study, in the way that we've just kind of explored through independent learning and through interdisciplinarity - this means that you develop additional skills as well.

We’ve put some of them down on the slide here for you (16:57): Flexibility and adaptability, like Simon said you're almost learning to speak different languages when you go to your different modules, which allows you to be tremendously flexible and adaptable. Self-management and self-responsibility, you're taking control of your own degree basically as a project that you're managing. Lots of problem solving and creative thinking. Reflection on the skills that you're developing, the knowledge that you're acquiring. Like I said at the beginning, Liberal Arts is strong on thinking about engaged citizenship and citizenship for freedom I guess, so partnership and community engagement and other kinds of experiences with non-academic stakeholders. You've got lots around independent and teamwork skills. Project management and lots of different kinds of communication for different audiences and different purposes. You've got a whole basket of skills there, on top of and beyond the standard set.

There's so much optionality built into Liberal Arts programmes that students have a really unusual level of ownership over their own studies, so you become really practiced with all of these things. By learning in different ways, about different things in different modules, by taking a much wider range of assessments than a single subject student might do, students who practice interdisciplinarity have practiced a much wider range of skills and can articulate this to their employers. Being able to think in creative and agile ways across different disciplinary perspectives amounts to a tremendous potential, and this we know is highly valued by employers.

When applying to Liberal Arts programmes, the first thing that's worth emphasising here, is that as we've already mentioned Liberal Arts programmes really do differ hugely from university to university. If you're interested in this way of learning, you're advised to look very carefully at individual courses to work out what will suit you best as individual learners. Talk to the admissions tutors at different universities, go to open days, look on the website, ask questions. We all love it when students, potential students get in touch, contact us to ask us about our programmes and how we teach Liberal Arts specifically.

When you come to make your application, you might only be applying to Liberal Arts programmes, or you might be applying to say one Liberal Arts programme and then other single subject degrees; the following advice I'm about to give you is relevant whether you're doing, whether you're applying to lots of Liberal Arts programmes or just a single subject degree. What it does, is it allows you to show your suitability for a Liberal Arts degree while also addressing different interests. First of all you might want to write about your passion for whatever discipline, disciplines or interdisciplinary research areas you're particularly interested in. Explain how your passion goes beyond just the one particular discipline or how your discipline of interest may connect to others. You might want to flag up your wider reading on a particular topic say, or if you're doing an EPQ, that might be a good way in. What you want to show us is, can you take different perspectives and think critically about these different perspectives and the connections between them.

Second, civic or community engagement is really important in a Liberal Arts education, so remember what we were talking about - Liberal Arts is education for free or engaged citizenship. Can you give us any examples of when you've been actively engaged in society - this might take a number of different forms, or can you think of areas where you might like to see change - can you tell us a little bit about that?

Finally, we're interested in you, so the kind of person you are as well as what you want to study - so what are you passionate about? What kind of experiences have you had that have changed the way that you thought, so this might be a book that you've read, it might be a lecture that you've watched on YouTube, most importantly, can you reflect on why these experiences were important to you?

That's a very brief introduction to Liberal Arts! Thank you for listening and I hope that we have conveyed some of our enthusiasm for this wonderful degree that we all teach.