Jack of all trades with a master’s degree. Review of the book “Obrazovatel’naya model’ svobodnykh iskusstv i nauk. Mirovoi i rossiiskii opyt” [Educational Model of Liberal Arts and Sciences. World and Russian experience]

Today when the remnants of a political system based on liberal values is finally breaking down all over the world and the values themselves are being subjected to purposeful profanation and relativization, an educational model based on academical freedom and development of a truly Renaissance breadth of scientific horizons – i. e. principles one would least expect to flourish in with the atmosphere of the forthcoming digital concentration camp – is gaining popularity with the pace none could have expected.. At least this is what the authors of the book in question are trying to convince us of. But despite all their efforts, reality – that is, who and why needs to rebuild the higher education system according to the model of the liberal arts and sciences – transpires before the attentive reader in all its inhuman pragmatism.

Student Perceptions of Great Teaching

What behaviors do students consider as representative of exemplary teaching? Do those representations vary by context? This study evaluates 176 student nominations for a teaching award that asked nominators to articulate specific acts by individual instructors that exemplify “great teaching.” Through an iterative process, our content analysis identified 10 themes, which generally represent socioemotional connection, behaviors relevant to student learning, and instructor characteristics. We also identified two themes—the instructor as a model and as someone whose efforts exceed expectations—that do not appear frequently in existing literature. The quantitative analysis revealed that frequency of themes differed for instructors from traditional liberal arts and sciences disciplines and those from professional programs in the health sciences.

Writing the Liberal Arts and Sciences

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.

Integrating Soliya’s Connect programmes into a language course and into a liberal arts and sciences degree

This chapter presents how I integrated Virtual Exchange (VE) programmes delivered by Soliya in two courses at an international undergraduate liberal arts and sciences college. In both cases the VE programme was fully integrated in the courses as a graded element. The students of beginner Italian participated in the four-week long Connect Express. While liking the experience, they found that the VE was still too disconnected from their aim of learning a language. The students of Intercultural Communication (IC) participated in the eight-week long Connect Global. For them, the success of the experience was linked to the group composition and the English proficiency level of participants.

“The Gods Must Be Crazy”: Students’ Attitudes and Dispositions as Enablers and Blockers to Internationalization

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.