Best Practices Workshop:
A Notion at Risk: Interrogating the educational role of off-campus study in the liberal arts

August 4-5, 2005
Southwestern University
Georgetown, Texas

Most liberal arts institutions enshrine goals in their mission statements regarding the development of a "framework for an integrated intellectual life" through the synthesis of critical thinking skills, moral and ethical discernment, and engagement with the social and political challenges of the day. The pedagogical goals of the liberal arts aspire, in other words, to nothing less than the intellectual and personal transformation of students in the name of constructive social action.

Mission statements for off-campus study units, however, tend to run at a tangent to those broader goals, choosing instead to focus on more narrow, pragmatic issues such as preparing students for participation in the global economy, increasing their level of "intercultural competence," and/or exposing them to "difference." While we often assume that these goals are necessarily interrelated with or at least mutually supportive of the liberal arts project, this Global Partners colloquium will offer twelve off-campus study administrators an opportunity to participate in a directed discussion exploring how that assumption might in fact be problematic in the pedagogical context of the liberal arts.

Participants in this colloquium were invited to engage with questions designed to interrogate the usual discussions of off campus study that assume, a priori, that an intercultural experience is a "good thing." They were asked both individually (i.e. with regard to their home institution) and in small groups (i.e. with regard to our shared project as liberal educators) to evaluate the educational goals of off-campus study and the pedagogical activity associated with off-campus study administration--advising, programming, courses, etc.--in relation to the full scope of the liberal arts project. We sought to explore critically the ways in which our failure to engage directly with the broader pedagogical context of our campuses might be serving to diminish the perceived educational value of off-campus study and then work as a group to devise concrete strategies for addressing the challenges we have delineated over the course of our discussions.

The intended audience for this colloquium was campus administrators whose principle responsibilities involve directing an off-campus study, international education and/or experiential learning office.

The workshop facilitators were Andrew Law (Director of International & Off-campus Study, Denison University) (lawa@denison.edu) and Sue Mennicke (Director of Intercultural Learning, Southwestern University) (mennicks@southwestern.edu).