Naked Teaching is on the road (fully clothed--you know that's just a metaphor, right?)! I (Heather) am at the AAC&U annual meeting on general education assessment. Did you just go to sleep? I didn't, because if you take out the assessment bit, which CAN be a little boring, this organization is ALL about liberal arts and general education. People here are talking about making Shakespeare relevant to today's students! They like values education! They see general education as a public good! Leslie Wong, president of San Francisco State, just said that the most important thing we can teach our students is to "own their own minds." Yes.
Wong also talked about the changing "face" (i.e., demographics) of students in the next 30 years or so, and the importance of making general education culturally relevant. This should make us think. At GMC, we're pretty good at making gen ed (our beloved Environmental Liberal Arts) fairly relevant to the problems of our time, such as climate change, but culturally relevant? We can work on this. I heard this morning that there are only 12 or so people left who can speak the Omaha (Native American) language fluently, for example, and I was reminded of Paul Hawking's idea in Blessed Unrest that preserving indigenous cultures, especially their languages, was essential to "the movement" that is needed to mitigate climate change and other ecological disasters. It's all connected.
Lots of people are live-tweeting the conference, including my alter Twitter ego, @JaybirdVT. Just search #AACUGenEd15.
“An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us.” ― John Dewey, Experience and Nature
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