Thoughts about being a teacher at a liberal arts college:
Do those of us in liberal arts institutions still follow the original
liberal arts model of scholarship? Maybe the historians on the list can
speak to this. My naive understanding is that in the early days of liberal
arts education, teachers were broadly and classically trained and interacted
with each other across disciplines. Am I right? I think now we are quite
isolated by discipline unless we or our schools make extra effort to reach
across boundaries. For instance, I am very well trained in cognitive
psychology and in reseach, fairly well trained in other areas of psychology,
and not at all confident in my understanding of theology and philosophy and
economics.
This is one reason I lack confidence in how I handle conversations with
students about issues being discussed on TIPS recently such as creationism
or divine intervention as an explanation for human behavior.
Does your institution do anything to encourage interaction or thinking or
learning across disciplines? For example, is there some mechanism for
auditing courses in other departments, or a forum for discussion among
faculty on general issues, or encouragement for co-teaching
interdisciplinary courses?
I would love to co-teach a course on Psychology and Theology, for instance,
but I would definitely need a partner from the Theology department. The way
our college is set up, there's no way to do that. How would one apportion
the salary and the teaching load credit?
Our seniors all take a capstone course called Great Books, which is taught
by literature professors. They've just revamped the reading list, and I
think it's improved because now instead of absolutely nothing about science
there's one piece by a philosopher of science. I think if it's intended as a
capstone course, then all of the faculty should have read everything on the
reading list. We're of course free to do so, but there's no institutional
support or encouragement for it.
I'd love to hear about what goes on at other schools to encourage liberal
arts scholarly development.
Nathalie
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Nathalie Coté
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Belmont Abbey College
100 Belmont - Mt. Holly Road
Belmont, NC 28012
(704) 825-6754
