Humanities & Liberal Arts

Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment White Paper

Interdisciplinary Learning: A Cognitive-Epistemological Foundation

Preparing individuals to lead informed and fulfilling lives in dynamic knowledge societies requires that we nurture synthesizing minds. We must nurture individuals’ capacity to to knit together knowledge from vast and disparate sources into coherent wholes in order to address pressing issues of cultural and natural survival (Gardner 2006).  Synthesis is a fundamental human capacity. It manifests early in life, when children engage in symbolic play, create artistic compositions, or learn the rules of a new game. To a certain extent, we learn to synthesize rather effortlessly by participating in societies where analogies, rich visual representations, and simple systems are ubiquitous. Interdisciplinary synthesis, however, presents heightened cognitive demands and requires deliberate instruction. It implies the integration of knowledge and modes of thinking in two or more disciplines in search for better understanding. Understanding how individuals learn to integrate different forms of expertise to create a work of art, explain a multifaceted phenomenon, fashion a new technology or propose a sustainable environmental solution is essential if we are to cultivate this capacity among collegiate and pre-collegiate youth. What cognitive processes are central to interdisciplinary integration?  What kind of “knowing” is embodied in a historical monument, an explanation overfishing or a sustainable development policy?  On what basis can we discern the relative success of such form of integrative cognition? Ultimately, how can we design instruction to nurture potent forms of interdisciplinary integration?

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Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle

Accessing the Humanities

Assessment in the fields of the humanities and humanistic social sciences has been a durably challenging enterprise, regardless of whether the target of assessment is student learning, teacher or faculty performance, or the experience of public humanities audiences. Over the course of the last four years, our research team on Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA) has developed a novel methodology for tackling this task. Our purposes in revisiting the question of whether it is possible to design assessment instruments that are appropriate to work in the humanities have been twofold. First, we have sought to equip humanistic practitioners—whether on campus or in public humanities settings—with tools to translate the impact of their work into the vocabulary of policy-makers and funders. Second, we have sought to equip these practitioners with tools that can provide meaningful insights into their work and support continuous improvement.

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Maker-Centered Learning and the Development of Self: Preliminary Findings of AbD

Over the last two years we have simultaneously pursued three strands of work: 1) a review of pertinent literature; 2) interviews and site visits with leading maker educators; and 3) action research and concept development. We’re now commencing our third year of work. Our active data collection stage is over. We are well into an analysis of our results and are currently preparing several publications—including a book. However, in the put-it-out-there-and-tweak-as-you-go spirit of the maker movement, we offer this white paper as a preliminary glimpse at the emergent findings from our work, and as an open invitation to the maker educator community to continue to connect with us and share ideas.