Curriculum Initiatives
Inspiring Intellectual and Civic Engagement:
Integrating Liberal Learning
In spring 2004, Bentley received a three-year, $204,320 grant from the Massachusetts-based Davis Educational Foundation to support a new Arts and Sciences initiative: Inspiring Intellectual and Civic Engagement: Integrating Liberal Learning.
This new initiative will further our academic mission to provide students not only the skills essential to professional success, but to also provide the kind of expansive liberal education that will prepare them for a life-time of intellectual and civic engagement.
Teaching at a premier business school in which 94 percent of undergraduates major in accounting, finance, management and other business disciplines, Bentley faculty have long experienced student indifference to the very idea of liberal learning. These students often view arts and sciences requirements as hindrances to what they consider their real education in the business disciplines.
The phenomenon of students in professional programs focusing intensely on their fields is not limited to those in business; it is also true of students in education, nursing, and engineering. Even fine arts majors, to cite another example, take as many courses as they possibly can in their chosen medium, be it music, theatre, visual art, or film.
We believe that students will be successful in their chosen fields in direct proportion to their ability to integrate seemingly unrelated ideas and perspectives into their chosen discipline. We further believe that students so prepared will enjoy more meaningful and expansive lives that embrace more than the relatively narrow concerns of work and career. Finally, we believe emphatically that liberal learning is critical to attaining these goals.
Until recently, Bentley faculty have attempted to overcome student indifference to the arts and sciences with a variety of innovative but ad hoc responses, such as increasing the number and variety of elective courses and emphasizing the study of primary texts in all arts and sciences courses. They have also tried to add breadth to the curriculum by requiring students to take "checkoff" courses that intensively address writing, diversity, and international issues. Nevertheless, the arts and sciences faculty recognize the limitations of these efforts, and believe that what is required is an aggressive, systematic solution that makes liberal education integral to business education.
To do this, we are pursuing a solution that we are convinced will both dramatically alter student attitudes toward liberal education at Bentley and improve the quality of that education. Further, we believe that it has the potential to serve as a model for other institutions where the majority of undergraduates enroll for professional degrees. (The beneficial role of the arts in business education is discussed in Artful Making: What Managers need to know about how Artists Work, by R. Austin & L. Devin, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.)
The Initiative
In the 1990s, with support from the Davis Educational Foundation, the Bentley Technology Adoption Initiative employed a model of highly successful workshops that helped Bentley faculty infuse information technology into the core business curriculum. Another model of workshops offered at the University of California at Berkeley helped promote diversity across the curriculum. Bentley is using these models in the service of the arts and sciences to help students integrate the perspectives and skill-sets they learn in one context with those they learn in another. These include:
- Ethics and social responsibility
- Technology and effective communication
- Creative thinking and critical analysis
- Service to the community
- Diversity and global citizenship
To achieve this ambitious goal, we are pursuing a curricular revision strategy that will promote productive and meaningful links among disparate learning contexts and experiences. Our goal is to permeate the curriculum with these perspectives and skill-sets so thoroughly that students cannot help but encounter and practice them repeatedly in multiple course contexts. In this way, students are exposed to such ideas, concepts and complexities over four years in both their business and liberal arts courses. If successful, the currently required “check offs” will disappear as students are inculcated with core perspectives and skill-sets throughout and across their course of study.
Faculty development is at the center of this strategy. We plan a series of intensive summer workshops for faculty who are eager to reshape their syllabi, improve their courses, and enhance their pedagogy so that the critical priorities of liberal learning are marbled throughout what they teach, regardless of the discipline. Workshop participants are chosen by the following process:
- A “call for proposals” is issued to the faculty by the project director; applicants are asked to make a strong case that participation in the workshop will have a significant effect on more than one of the courses they teach.
- Interested faculty return the proposals to the project director, who reviews them in consultation with the deans of Arts and Sciences and Business as appropriate, as well as with a representative group of department chairs.
- Our goal is to achieve participation by 40 faculty members per summer, 20 per workshop. Bentley has 16 academic departments, and we hope to have two participants each from larger departments, and one each from smaller departments. This goal will also guide the selection process.
The workshops take place over two, two-week periods during the summer on the Bentley campus and each session is approximately a half-day long. They are led by college faculty, with assistance as necessary by colleagues with particular expertise from other institutions.
Outcome and Assessment
The ultimate success of this initiative will be represented by – and embodied in – a professional who is an intellectually and civically engaged member of the workforce and community through life’s many phases and in response to its many opportunities and challenges. In the meantime, we will measure success objectively by the following means:
- Periodic focus groups with students beginning at the end their freshman year to ascertain the effectiveness and impact of the initiative.
- All Bentley students complete a quantitative evaluation of each course they take, the Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET). We are incorporating into this standard survey a set of questions that will help us to determine the initiative’s success.
- When the first group of students educated under the initiative graduate, we will through both surveys and focus groups ask them nuanced versions of the following question:
“Based on your academic experience over four years, how would you describe what matters most in a Bentley education; to what values does a Bentley education explicitly and implicitly subscribe?”
It is our goal that among the top 10 descriptors embedded in these answers will be a significant number of the following: ethical awareness, critical analysis and thinking, effective communication, social responsibility, engaged citizenship, service to the community, cultural diversity, creative thinking, and global citizenship.
If this initiative succeeds – and we are confident it will – it will reshape undergraduate education at Bentley, will constitute one of its most distinctive features, and will become a fundamental part of our educational mission.
Trans-disciplinary Education at Bentley
Under the leadership of a new Provost and new deans of Arts and Sciences and Business, Bentley has undertaken a comprehensive and – for other institutions – unusual effort to foster trans-disciplinary research and pedagogy.
This initiative to integrate liberal learning across our business school is part of this effort, though its roots go back many years in Bentley’s evolution. Business and Arts and Sciences faculty collaborated nearly 30 years ago in founding the Center for Business Ethics, among the first such centers in the nation. More recently, in 1999, English Department faculty established the Design and Usability Testing Center to help companies and others to improve the ease with which information technology products are used, and to enhance the quality of the user experience. (The benefits of trans-disciplinary education are elucidated in The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, Gibbons, Limoges, et al., London: Sage, 1995.)
