Allison Trulli, Senior Education Counsellor at IEC >> It would be great to know what you think makes that programme (Liberal Arts) at Warwick stand out and why it would be you know a wonderful opportunity for a student thinking about this degree to also consider studying at the University of Warwick.

Dr Bryan Brazeau, Senior Teaching Fellow in Liberal Arts >> Yeah, so I would say there's a number of things that make us stand out. One of the biggest things is the fact that we're one of the only Liberal Arts programmes in the UK that has dedicated academic faculty. Many times Liberal Arts will borrow staff from different departments to say 'oh you come and teach this one class, you come and teach this class', but the students in that department don't feel like they have a home. Whereas here at Warwick, we have four staff who are all based in the department, we're all employed by Liberal Arts, we're all really passionate about Liberal Arts and it's really nice because we have that sense of a small department. In a sense what I love about being part of this department is I'm replicating the sort of undergraduate department I was in. That sense of a small department, we know all the students by name, we work with them individually, and we really have that personal touch, students know us, we know them.

And what we try and do in our department - what's different from other Liberal Arts degrees that you might see - is we really embed Problem-Based Learning into all of our teaching. Now you might be like 'what is Problem-Based Learning, this sounds really complicated'. A good way to think about it is if you're familiar with IKEA. Many students go to IKEA - you've been to IKEA with your parents. At IKEA, you'll often buy something and you bring it home and you build it yourself and psychologists have looked at this and they've actually said it's called the IKEA effect. Students, not students, but people who buy things at IKEA tend to value them so much more because they built them themselves than something they just bought from a store and that's the animating strategy that really drives so much of our teaching - it drives the way that I teach my classes because I don't show up and say 'here's knowledge, just take it', right. We give you the tools to kind of think through 'well wait a minute how can I build this?', in the same way you'd get something from IKEA and you have instructions, but everybody's going to build things slightly differently, everyone's going to pick different things, that's what we try and do in our programme and we do that by looking at real-world problems to get you to you know grapple with them and recognise how complicated the world is. We don't tell you what to think, we teach you how to think and then you choose where you want to go with that. That leads us to talking again about the structure of the department, right. It's really important to us that the department feels like a comfortable home base for students. We have a lounge that's dedicated just for our students and students in Global Sustainable Development and then within this home base, you have the ability to choose and build your own path.

So our students will either choose a Disciplinary Interest path, so they'll say I want to do Liberal Arts and History or Liberal Arts and Economics, and that's fine, you can be based with us you take more and more classes with those departments as time goes on. Or, we have a lot of students who say 'you know I really want to come up with my own degree, I want to come up with my own pathway'. A good example of this is we have a student who's really passionate about opera. We don't have a music programme at Warwick... not a problem. The student's based with us in Liberal Arts, but that student is then taking classes in the French Department to learn about French operas in the 19th century. The student's writing her final research project on operas in the early 20th century and how they were performed in the United States in certain concert halls. And we have these amazing students who just you know find their own pathways through things. We try to help them and to coach them, but students determine their own pathways and I think that's one of the things that I love about teaching in this programme is no student is the same, no student is a number. We really love to see students develop, to learn about the world, and then to find something they're passionate about and to help give them the skills to develop that. I don't know if that makes sense?

Allison Trulli >> It does, it makes sense and I think it's really important and useful you know this is something that anyone who's interested in anything, this course is useful for them because it's giving them the tools that they need to be able to move forward successfully in whatever direction they choose to go afterwards.

Dr Bryan Brazeau >> Yeah and I mean I think in terms of the types of courses (modules) we offer in terms of the department, our core courses (modules) there's a lot of them in the first year and slowly yet surely students take more and more classes outside the department as they progress in the degree. So in the first year, we have classes like 'Art and Revolution' where you look at the links between art and different kinds of revolutions in history. I teach a class on 'Science, Society, and the Media' where we look at how complicated it is to look at the relationship between science, the history of science, the way that's communicated in media. We spent five weeks this term just looking at COVID-19 and how it was conveyed in the news to get students to think critically about the world around them. Students do classes on 'Sustainability' and 'Consumption' in their second year looking at these really key problems. And then we have a whole suite of really interesting optional modules that students can take. Some of the really fun ones that I teach and I'll talk more about one of the books I teach in one of these today, I teach classes on Underworlds, classes on Paradises, we have classes on the Quest, we have classes on Apocalypse, we have classes on Utopias. It's really fun, it's engaging, and it's quite rigorous as well. Our students tend to produce amazing research because we believe in them.

Allison Trulli >> Yeah and that's really important isn't it, giving them that confidence to go down the path that's the most exciting for them, because that's what's going to allow them later to figure out where to go and how to do it you know and thinking about their futures and and and having a successful as well as a happy professional life.

Dr Bryan Brazeau >> And we also have an Employment Manager who's a dedicated Employability and Placements Manager in the department. We're one of the only departments at Warwick that has this and this person works really closely with students to help them develop employability skills. If students want, they can do a one-year work placement or summer work placements and we know that Liberal Arts skills are really attractive to employers. Employers want people who can communicate effectively, they want people who can think critically, they don't want cookie-cutter economists churned out by the same department. I mean I love economics, I think it's a fascinating field, but employers want people who can think for themselves, who can be strong independent individuals, who are able to go in and to really make a difference. That's the most important thing really and that's really what the Liberal Arts are all about is thinking critically and learning how to make a difference and to affect positive change in the world.

Allison Trulli >> There's the key isn't it's the way to figure out you know how we can be the most impactful in a positive way, not only for ourselves but for the communities around us. Yeah exactly. So it's really it's actually really a quite a beautiful thing to choose apart from you know fun and also interesting.