Liberal Learning as a Quest for Purpose
William M. Sullivan
Abstract
In a remarkable experiment lasting over a decade, a group of 88 independent campuses, ranging from comprehensive universities to intimate colleges, have demonstrated the value of an emerging educational agenda focused on infusing the exploration of meaning and purpose into undergraduate life. These programs have shown that college can provide emerging adults with an understanding of themselves and today’s insecure and highly competitive world that enhances their ability to develop the resilience to create meaningful lives. By focusing on the exploration of vocation, including its theological m ... More
In a remarkable experiment lasting over a decade, a group of 88 independent campuses, ranging from comprehensive universities to intimate colleges, have demonstrated the value of an emerging educational agenda focused on infusing the exploration of meaning and purpose into undergraduate life. These programs have shown that college can provide emerging adults with an understanding of themselves and today’s insecure and highly competitive world that enhances their ability to develop the resilience to create meaningful lives. By focusing on the exploration of vocation, including its theological meanings, these efforts produced remarkable outcomes in enhanced student engagement in learning and more effective entry into adult life. Discernment of vocation provided, for many students, a synthetic and compelling focus for intellectual and practical exploration. Sustained by articulate reflection and grounded in communities of learning that included faculty as well as students, undergraduate life took on new significance and urgency. Examining the experiences of students and faculty, this book reveals the concrete importance of this educational agenda for individual lives and particular campuses. By connecting the several dimensions of undergraduate experience through reflection on purpose, these programs expanded the bandwidth of academic learning to strengthen the broad aims of liberal education. Within the larger, troubled environment of contemporary higher education these pioneering efforts hold promise for a significant rethinking of the undergraduate experience to better serve students and society.
Keywords:
academic apprenticeship,
social apprenticeship,
apprenticeship of Identity and Purpose,
emerging adults,
humanistic learning,
secularity versus secularism,
communities of learning,
vocation and calling,
purpose,
meaning,
reflection
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190499242 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190499242.001.0001 |