This post from June 2017 appeared on the website of the HASS – Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences – Futures project in Australia, as part of the lead-up to the September 2017 National Forum on the Future of the B.A. Tom’s subsequent presentation at the Forum on our WINCan preliminary work led to our collaboration with two Australian university partners (the University of Queensland and Monash University).
Here’s a quick summary…you can read the full post here on the HASS Futures website:
A recent article in The Harvard Magazine explores new models for an “educated core” curriculum centred on the liberal arts. “We have to think about a future-ready graduate…able to zoom out and zoom in…to identify problems, define options, and build relationships that span cultures and boundaries.”
In the article, Harvard Magazine Editor John Rosenberg highlights three very different examples that expand the range of possibilities for HASS Futures discussions:
“a significantly reconceived liberal-arts college 10,000 miles from the eastern U.S. epicenter of elite higher education” [TC: take that, Oxford and Cambridge…and, yes, ten thousand miles from the U.S. east coast gets you to Singapore and the evolving collaboration between Yale University and the National University of Singapore]
a “methods-oriented” core exploring 12 different Ways of Knowing, proposed by a former professional school Dean as the ideal prerequisite for any professional discipline [TC: this reminded me of the wonderful work on Epistemic Fluency by our colleagues Peter Goodyear and Lina Markauskaite at Sydney University]
a Silicon Valley startup institution, the Minerva Schools, where the focus is on liberal education as “practical knowledge” which students can use to adapt to a changing world (along with a novel integration of pedagogy based on scientific research on learning, a new technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time and a hybrid residential model where students live together (rotating term-by-term through seven cities around the world)