Book Review: Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century

Luckett Jr., Robert E., ed. Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. xvii + 286 pp. ISBN (paperback): 978-1-4968-3317-4.

By Colin A. Anderson, Hiram College

Banner photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

John Warner has suggested that “general education is a problem of pedagogy not subject matter.”1 If so, and if the venerable tradition of liberal education is to adapt and thrive, the challenge we face is not to come up with a slate of courses, or course options that would collectively “liberally educate” students for the 21st century, but instead to transform learning for liberal education in whatever courses might constitute a required curriculum. The traditional distributional model of general education, inherited from the 1945 Harvard report, “General Education in a Free Society,” arguably exhausted itself after a fifty-odd-year tenure, initiating the fin-de-siecle search for a conception of liberal education that might take us into the unknowns of the 21st century.2  A contemporary consensus evolved out of the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ LEAP initiative (Liberal Education and America’s Promise), which foregrounded transferable skills—such as written communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving, among others—that are now widely seen as the essence of liberal education.3  The task that the AAC&U’s initiatives leaves for us is the adaptation of traditional “liberal arts” disciplinary courses to this new orienting purpose which will carry the justification of continuing commitment to liberal education in our era of hyper-specialization and disciplinary instrumentalization.

Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century takes up this task in a collection of seventeen essays grouped under six topical headings 1) Digital Humanities, Technology; 2) The Arts; 3) Pedagogy; 4) Writing; 5) Social Issues; 6) The African American Experience. In addition, the volume includes a preface, introduction, and conclusion. The essays were, it appears, delivered at an eponymous 2016 conference at Jackson State University, and the faculty and departments of the home institution are broadly represented in twelve of the nineteen chapters.

Before surveying the contents of these essays, it is worth indicating that they share, essentially, the consensus defense of liberal education summarized above, and that argument is made in most or all of these essays, which leads to a significant degree of repetition if the volume is read start to finish. Authors from different disciplines, of course, emphasize different skills and outcomes, but in almost all the essays, we find the same core argument that the liberal arts are especially equipped to cultivate skills that technical, vocational, and specialized curricula overlook, and which are essential for the development of good democratic citizens.

To give a sense of the wide-range of disciplinary perspectives and pedagogical innovations across the seventeen essays, I will briefly survey the core aim of each essay while highlighting the contents of several that stood out for a variety of reasons. The six topical headings that organize the volume are discussed below in pairs.

Technology and the Arts: The first two sections of this volume explore some ways in which technology and pedagogy can reorient traditional disciplinary courses, especially in the arts, and engage students in new ways. In her essay, “Digital Arts as a LEAP High-Impact Practice,” Seretha Williams shows how digital humanities methodologies can help students achieve LEAP or higher learning goals in writing courses, providing multiple examples of projects from courses and student work. Monica Flippin Wynn (“Technology in the Liberal Arts Classroom”) explains how to develop a “digital toolkit” for teaching, exploring some of the pedagogical intricacies through examples from her own toolkit. Yumi Park Huntington’s contribution, “Teaching Art History to STEM,” explores strategies to reconfigure art history pedagogy to engage STEM students in cultivating the visual and analytic skills central to art history and also to their chosen majors. The discussion includes brief reference to some of the digital platforms that might be useful in this regard. Sarah Archino significantly develops Park Huntington’s argument in her own contribution on visual literacy, “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultivating Visual Literacy.” Using the example of the documented benefits of visual literacy workshops for medical students, Archino’s essay develops a precise argument for the benefits of developing courses in visual literacy for general education students in addition to more traditional art history curriculum. The ability to translate the curriculum into documentable transferable skills provides a powerful argument for the importance of visual literacy via art history for general education. Floyd Martin returns to Erwin Panofsky’s essay on art history as a humanistic discipline to articulate the benefits of such study, alongside some confirmation of these concerns culled from recent articles in The New York Times.4  Finally, Lauren Ashlee Messina describes and explores “Dancing the Humanities” as a pedagogy for tackling contemporary social issues.

Pedagogy and Writing: The next two sections explore a variety of topics connected to revitalizing the pedagogy to meet students “where they are” and enable transformative learning. Helen Chukwuma (“Test-Oriented Pedagogy in the Teaching of Communication Skills”) opens the section on pedagogy with a defense of a “test-centric” pedagogy for teaching communication skills, in which she seems to understand “test” in a much wider-range of assessments and evaluations than is customary. Kathy Root Pitts’s essay, “Flexible Thought for the Test-Focused Student,” plumps for a greater role for creativity in liberal arts courses in order to free students from the culture of standardized testing through creative engagement with the meaning of art objects. Lawrence Sledge argues that liberal arts courses need to be transformed through student-sensitive pedagogies (understood as culturally relevant/responsive teaching) if they are to maintain their importance (“Developing a More Student-Sensitive Approach in the Liberal Arts”). Beginning the group of essays on writing and liberal arts, Tatiana Glusko and Kathi Griffin’s essay “Conversation in the Writing Center” proposes a reconceptualization of the role of the writing center as a place for dialogue and community rather than a helpdesk or a place for copy-correction. In one of the richest contributions to the volume, Eric Griffin (“Translingualism, Transhistoricism, and Shakespeare in a Freshman Seminar”) describes how he transformed his Shakespeare course with a translingual pedagogy. This essay exemplifies the way in which pedagogy drives curricular evolution and the process of redefining the liberal arts through copious examples of innovative assignments that engage students “where they are” rather than bemoans the decline of an imagined liberal arts consensus. Rounding out this section, a group of four authors (Preselfannie W. McDaniels, Byron D’Andra Orey, Rico D. Chapman and Wynn) present their experience of developing a “writing boot camp” program for liberal arts faculty to facilitate and enrich their academic and scholarly work through community and mutual support.

Social Issues and the African American Experience: The last two sections of the volume broaden its scope by exploring the intersection between liberal arts education and a variety of social issues. Rashell Smith-Spears (“You Can’t Say That: Warnings, Political Correctness, and Academic Freedom”) examines how education is being transformed around issues of academic freedom including trigger warnings and “political correctness.” In “Not All Apples Are Red,” Katrina Byrd explores the ways in which power, conformity, and society structure curriculum and classroom in a provocative call for transformative, active, and collaborative pedagogies. Thomas Kersen brings a sociologist’s eye to identify the ways in which liberal arts education and educators can function as a “molder of consensus” for society (Mississippi in particular) and restore a sense of common good and purpose in the public arena. The volume’s editor, Robert Luckett, Jr., contributes a fascinating historical essay, “Historical Memory and the Meredith Monument at Ole Miss,” concerning the creation of the Civil Rights Memorial at Mississippi University which played out as a recapitulation of the white supremacist tactic of “practical segregation”—erasing the experiences of those who fought and replacing them with a positive and optimistic message focused on the outcome. In Luckett’s telling this decades-long struggle over the design, siting, and fund-raising for this memorial can reveal the importance of a liberal education in anti-racist struggles. The final chapter before the conclusion, “(Re)Engineering a New Liberal Arts Experience: Future Studies and HBCUs,” is written by a trio of authors, Joseph Martin Stevenson, Dawn Bishop McLin, and Karen Wilson-Stevenson. They argue that HCBUs should develop “future studies” and “futuring methods” as a way of positioning themselves in a forward-looking evolution of the liberal arts tradition. Although there are important ideas captured in this final essay, the prevalence of an airy “consultant-speak” may frustrate the academic reader.

At its best, this book explores some of the many ways in which liberal arts education is dynamically developing and adapting to changing students, technologies, and social-political environments. It provides testimony of the efforts of faculty across many different disciplines to revitalize liberal education through inventive and ambitious pedagogical changes. The repetition of the core argument in defense of liberal education can veer towards a sermon preached for the choir, although the fact that the essays include either practical suggestions for the classroom or curriculum or reviews of relevant literature from other experts on the chosen topic will repay the choir’s attention.

NOTES

  1. John Warner, “Gen Ed Is a Problem of Pedagogy, Not Subject Matter,” accessed 13 December 2023, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/gen-ed-problem-pedagogy-not-subject-matter.
  2. “General Education in a Free Society” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945).
  3. Carol Geary Schneider, Making Liberal Education Inclusive: The Roots and Reach of the LEAP Framework for College Learning (Washington: AAC&U, 2021).
  4. Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in The Meaning of the Humanities, ed. Theodore Meyer Greene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 89–118.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“General Education in a Free Society.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945.

Panofsky, Erwin. “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline.” In The Meaning of the Humanities, edited by Theodore Meyer Greene, 89–118. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940.

Schneider, Carol Geary. Making Liberal Education Inclusive: The Roots and Reach of the LEAP Framework for College Learning. Washington, AAC&U, 2021.

Warner, John. “Gen Ed Is a Problem of Pedagogy, Not Subject Matter,” Inside Higher Ed, Accessed 13 December 2023. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/gen-ed-problem-pedagogy-not-subject-matter.