Faculty Leadership for Integrative Liberal Learning: Principles and Practices

Overview

There is a growing national emphasis on fostering undergraduate students’ integrative learning through multiple forms of engaged educational experiences. As learning across boundaries becomes a signature characteristic of a 21st century liberal education, curricular, co-curricular, and pedagogical innovations call for new forms of cross-cutting faculty oversight to discern the quality and level of students’ overall integrative learning. Such oversight is in addition to the responsibility that the faculty already have for the effectiveness of the curriculum in their own departments and across general education.

Working individually on campus and collectively in regional affinity clusters, nine teams will develop long-term plans for developing sustained and self-renewing faculty leadership for the cumulative aims and outcomes of integrative liberal learning across the curriculum.

Participating institutions will:

• articulate “Principle and Practices” to guide integrative liberal learning for today’s students;
• create or strengthen models for faculty leadership and oversight of integrative liberal learning;
• create or strengthen models for socializing newly appointed faculty to the goals of integrative liberal learning;
• engage colleagues on their campuses and beyond with the “Principles and Practices”; and
• engage national colleagues through AAC&U meetings, publications, and initiatives.

Project Participants

The following institutions will participate in the project:

Each institution is led by a team of three project liaisons—an academic administrator and two faculty members with broad responsibility for the undergraduate curriculum. In addition, each campus has identified a larger faculty entity to which the project teams will report—an entity that consults together on needed changes in faculty educational leadership for integrative learning and new faculty orientation to liberal learning.

Project Staff

Ann Ferren, AAC&U Senior Fellow, aferren@radford.edu

Kevin Hovland, Senior Director of Global Learning and Curricular Change, hovland@aacu.org

Chad Anderson, Program Associate, anderson@aacu.org

This project is made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation and the Teagle Foundation.