Banner photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash<\/em><\/p>\n John Warner has suggested that \u201cgeneral education is a problem of pedagogy not subject matter.\u201d1 <\/sup>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 \u201cliberally educate\u201d students for the 21st<\/sup> 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, \u201cGeneral Education in a Free Society,\u201d arguably exhausted itself after a fifty-odd-year tenure, initiating the fin-de-siecle<\/i> search for a conception of liberal education that might take us into the unknowns of the 21st<\/sup> century.2<\/sup>\u00a0 <\/span>A contemporary consensus evolved out of the American Association of Colleges and Universities\u2019 LEAP initiative (Liberal Education and America\u2019s Promise), which foregrounded transferable skills\u2014such as written communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving, among others\u2014that are now widely seen as the essence of liberal education.3<\/sup>\u00a0 <\/span>The task that the AAC&U\u2019s initiatives leaves for us is the adaptation of traditional \u201cliberal arts\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century <\/i>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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Technology and the Arts: <\/b>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, \u201cDigital Arts as a LEAP High-Impact Practice,\u201d 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 (\u201cTechnology in the Liberal Arts Classroom\u201d) explains how to develop a \u201cdigital toolkit\u201d for teaching, exploring some of the pedagogical intricacies through examples from her own toolkit. Yumi Park Huntington\u2019s contribution, \u201cTeaching Art History to STEM,\u201d 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\u2019s argument in her own contribution on visual literacy, \u201cAn Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultivating Visual Literacy.\u201d Using the example of the documented benefits of visual literacy workshops for medical students, Archino\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/i>.4\u00a0 <\/span><\/sup>Finally, Lauren Ashlee Messina describes and explores \u201cDancing the Humanities\u201d as a pedagogy for tackling contemporary social issues.<\/p>\n Pedagogy and Writing:<\/b> The next two sections explore a variety of topics connected to revitalizing the pedagogy to meet students \u201cwhere they are\u201d and enable transformative learning. Helen Chukwuma (\u201cTest-Oriented Pedagogy in the Teaching of Communication Skills\u201d) opens the section on pedagogy with a defense of a \u201ctest-centric\u201d pedagogy for teaching communication skills, in which she seems to understand \u201ctest\u201d in a much wider-range of assessments and evaluations than is customary. Kathy Root Pitts\u2019s essay, \u201cFlexible Thought for the Test-Focused Student,\u201d 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 (\u201cDeveloping a More Student-Sensitive Approach in the Liberal Arts\u201d). Beginning the group of essays on writing and liberal arts, Tatiana Glusko and Kathi Griffin\u2019s essay \u201cConversation in the Writing Center\u201d 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 (\u201cTranslingualism, Transhistoricism, and Shakespeare in a Freshman Seminar\u201d) 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 \u201cwhere they are\u201d 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\u2019Andra Orey, Rico D. Chapman and Wynn) present their experience of developing a \u201cwriting boot camp\u201d program for liberal arts faculty to facilitate and enrich their academic and scholarly work through community and mutual support.<\/p>\n Social Issues and the African American Experience: <\/b>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 (\u201cYou Can\u2019t Say That: Warnings, Political Correctness, and Academic Freedom\u201d) examines how education is being transformed around issues of academic freedom including trigger warnings and \u201cpolitical correctness.\u201d In \u201cNot All Apples Are Red,\u201d 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\u2019s eye to identify the ways in which liberal arts education and educators can function as a \u201cmolder of consensus\u201d for society (Mississippi in particular) and restore a sense of common good and purpose in the public arena. The volume\u2019s editor, Robert Luckett, Jr., contributes a fascinating historical essay, \u201cHistorical Memory and the Meredith Monument at Ole Miss,\u201d concerning the creation of the Civil Rights Memorial at Mississippi University which played out as a recapitulation of the white supremacist tactic of \u201cpractical segregation\u201d\u2014erasing the experiences of those who fought and replacing them with a positive and optimistic message focused on the outcome. In Luckett\u2019s 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, \u201c(Re)Engineering a New Liberal Arts Experience: Future Studies and HBCUs,\u201d is written by a trio of authors, Joseph Martin Stevenson, Dawn Bishop McLin, and Karen Wilson-Stevenson. They argue that HCBUs should develop \u201cfuture studies\u201d and \u201cfuturing methods\u201d 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 \u201cconsultant-speak\u201d may frustrate the academic reader.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s attention.<\/p>\nNOTES<\/h4>\n