Writing the Liberal Arts and Sciences

2021 ◽  

Starting from informal cross-disciplinary conversations between colleagues, this volume is the result of an experiment in understanding the standpoints and methodologies of others in a multidisciplinary setting. At its heart are the core values of a liberal arts education: intellectual curiosity and the ability to communicate across borders. Written with the aim of communicating academic content to non-specialists, the essays interweave narratives about truth with various kinds of dialogue and the importance of historical consciousness. Together they illustrate the power of writing as a tool for strengthening a scholarly community.

Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Jasonides ◽  
Amalia Zavacopoulou

The purpose of this chapter is to document the transformation of a blended, high school Humanities course to a virtual course that maintains a strong academic focus and preserves the core values of a human-centered education. The authors share the process of redesigning the course content, learning activities, and assessment, using specific examples from their experience and their research. The authors evaluate their experience by presenting the challenges and benefits of this undertaking. Ultimately, the goal of the authors is to assure that the Humanities Program at the American Community Schools Athens will continue to adapt to the digital world, making wise use of educational technology to provide our students with a broad, humanistic, liberal arts education that will serve them well in any field of endeavor.


Author(s):  
Samuel Barnish

The modern encyclopedic genre was unknown in the classical world. In the grammar-based culture of late antiquity, learned compendia, by both pagan and Christian writers, were organized around a text treated as sacred or around the canon of seven liberal arts and sciences, which were seen as preparatory to divine contemplation. Such compendia, heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, helped to unite the classical and Christian traditions and transmit learning, including Aristotelian logic, to the Middle Ages. Writers in the encyclopedic tradition include figures such as Augustine and Boethius, both of whom were extremely influential throughout the medieval period. Other important writers included Macrobius, whose Saturnalia spans a very wide range of subjects; Martianus Capella, whose De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Marriage of Philology and Mercury) covers the seven liberal arts and sciences; Cassiodorus, who presents the arts as leading towards the comtemplation of the heavenly and immaterial; and Isidore, whose Etymologies became one of the most widely referred-to texts of the Middle Ages. These writers also had a strong influence which can be seen later in the period, particularly in the Carolingian Renaissance and again in the twelfth century.


2020 ◽  
pp. 102831532096428 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ehrhardt ◽  
Caroline Archambault

This article argues that students’ attitudes and dispositions can be important enablers or blockers to effective internationalization of the curriculum in higher education. Using a case study of teaching African studies at a Dutch Liberal Arts and Sciences college, this article shows that students have mixed explicit attitudes toward the subject matter, but more consistent implicit dispositions that influence their understanding. Specifically, our students show strong dispositions toward agency, rationality, separation, and similarity, which clarifies some aspects of the course content but obscures others. As such, they function as both enablers and blockers to intercultural learning. Since dispositions are common among university students and relevant to a wide array of intercultural learning contexts, this study offers important insights for designing and implementing effective internationalization—in particular, the need to tailor our efforts to the specific constellation of attitudes and dispositions, the course content, and the skills of both teachers and students.


2020 ◽  
Vol 101 (7) ◽  
pp. 10-16
Author(s):  
Johann N. Neem

It is a strange and sobering experience to read Hofstadter in our own anti-intellectual era. If anything, left-leaning intellectuals’ sense of alienation has increased since the 1990s. To challenge anti-intellectualism in American education, the liberal arts and sciences will need to be restored to their central place in the curriculum.


1960 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 141-146
Author(s):  
Elbert Fulkerson

For the Past Several Years the College of Education of Southern Illinois University has required its students majoring in elementary education to take a course known as Mathematics 210, which is described in the University Bulletin as a “professional treatment of the subject matter of arithmetic methods and a study of trends and current literature on the teaching of arithmetic.” This course is offered by the Mathematics Department of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and carries four quarter hours of credit. I ts prerequisite is a general mathematics course which does not count toward a major or minor in mathematics but which does include, however, a careful study of the real number system and other topics providing a better understanding of arithmetic and elementary algebra.


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