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International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 2021, Volume 33, Number 1, 62-72

http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/ ISSN 1812-9129

Delivering the Promise of the Liberal Arts Through Curricular Coherence and

Integrative Advising

Joyce Kloc Babyak

Oberlin College

Liberal arts colleges promise undergraduates a holistic education that builds life-long skills such as

critical thinking, written and oral communication, and quantitative and information literacy by

encouraging students to engage in courses across the curriculum. Yet too often, we do not offer students

enough support in developing coherent pathways and integrating what they learn, and that promise is

diminished. With Teagle Foundation support, The Five Colleges of Ohio (Denison University, Kenyon

College, Oberlin College, Ohio Wesleyan University, and The College of Wooster) and Allegheny

College joined together over four years to investigate and implement structural supports to help students

create a broader and more coherent roadmap to their educational experiences, including first-year

gateway courses to introduce pathfinding techniques, course concentrations to emphasize connections

across fields of study, and online mapping and advising tools linking courses, co-curricular

opportunities, and careers. The collaborators also involved faculty in rethinking their crucial advising

roles in a more integrative way. This instructional article describes the fundamental shifts institutions

made to enhance curricular coherence and integrative advising as well as the lessons learned from

setbacks and successes that informed ongoing initiatives.

Project Background and Institutional Contexts

Before the close of the January 2014 Annual

Meeting of the Association of American Colleges and

Universities (AAC&U), representatives from six

campuses—Allegheny College, Denison University,

Kenyon College, Oberlin College, Ohio Wesleyan

University, and The College of Wooster—held an

informal gathering to discuss a request for proposals

from the Teagle Foundation: Faculty Planning and

Curricular Coherence. We invited all members of the six

institutions at the annual meeting who were interested in

this project to gather for our discussion. Turnout was so

strong that we could barely fit around the large table we

had reserved. Thus began a five-year collaboration of

faculty and professional staff at six institutions, all drawn

to the idea that we could enhance student experience of

curricular coherence at our institutions by working

together and sharing our ideas, experiences, challenges,

and successes. In retrospect, the crowded table of

educators eager to share, learn, and develop new

strategies served as a model for our experience during

our planning and implementation grant periods.

In many ways, the six institutions were a natural

cohort for this work. All six are high-touch residential

liberal arts institutions in relatively close geographic

proximity. Five of the institutions were members of The

Five Colleges of Ohio consortium, with a solid history

of shared interests and collaborations. These five

institutions had also, at various times, collaborated with

Allegheny College and are members of the Great Lakes

Colleges Association. So we were a group that was

poised to work together on this project. We were also

keenly aware that our students were facing new

challenges as they looked forward to an uncertain

future, knowing that they needed to prepare themselves

to live in a rapidly changing world and move into

careers that did not yet exist or that would exist in

entirely new ways. As institutions long committed to

excellence in teaching and research, we were convinced

that the liberal arts model would provide students with

a strong yet flexible foundation for this uncertain

future. At the same time, we were also—each in our

own ways—responding to AAC&U’s Liberal

Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative by

intensifying our focus on high impact practices

identified in the LEAP report (e.g., participation in

learning communities, service learning, study abroad,

internships), which can improve student learning

outcomes while preparing students for successful

careers (AAC&U, 2011). However, we wanted to do

more to shift our institutions’ capacities to serve our

students and deliver on our promise to students. So, we

went to work and identified interrelated strategies to

prepare students to excel throughout their lives.

Teagle’s request for proposals invited applications

that focused on strengthening curricular coherence in

the major or the general curriculum. Given our

institutions’ existing focus on structural and intellectual

coherence of the major areas of study and the close

guidance students received from faculty within their

majors who serve as their teachers, research mentors,

and advisors, we were in agreement that our focus

would be on the general curriculum. We should note

that at our institutions there is formally no separate

general education curriculum. Instead, courses that a

student takes that do not count for that student’s major

or minor area of study can be considered part of that

student’s general curriculum with only a small number

of exceptions at some institutions. Our challenge, then,

was not that we each had a set general curriculum that

we wanted to make more coherent for students, but that

Babyak Delivering the Promise of Liberal Arts 63

we had courses that counted in various ways for

students depending on their own progress through the

institution, and we wanted to offer students coherent

pathways through this significant part of their

coursework. At the same time, we also wanted to help

students make intellectual and practical connections for

themselves in their curricular and co-curricular work.

In order to achieve these aims, we identified three

components to the overall project. The first, structuring

curricular connections, was an initiative that focused

directly on developing structured paths through the general

curriculum both at the institutional level and across

multiple campuses. Inspired by Ohio Wesleyan’s

experience with cross-divisional networks of courses

organized around common themes, partners wanted to

explore the creation of similar networks on their own

campuses. The second, finding and sustaining

connections, supported the effort to create structured

pathways by developing online mapping tools to identify

connections in each institution’s curriculum and across the

curricula of multiple institutions. By design, this work

built on Oberlin’s ObieMAPS, an online mapping tool that

helped users identify connections among curricular areas

and subject expertise across the campus. The third,

focusing on students, complemented the efforts to provide

structured pathways through the general curriculum by

developing forms of support such as integrative advising

and the strategic use of electronic portfolios to enhance

students’ abilities to integrate their overall educational

experiences, learning from the work already undertaken in

these areas by Denison and Wooster.

Efforts to create meaningful change inevitably

entail challenges and disappointments. What is key,

however, is to recognize challenges and respond

creatively. Our experience was no different. The

following offers (a) a description of the three grant

strategies in more detail, (b) an account of challenges

encountered as well as successes, and (c) examples of

course corrections we made along the way. Because

we learned from challenges and successes, the

sections on the three strategies each begin with an

account of one or two institutions’ challenges and

responses to those challenges—experiences we all

learned from and took account of in our individual

initiatives. Attention is given to the challenges here

because in our experience the process of innovation

and change was often not as straightforward as we had

anticipated. This is not unlike other similar initiatives.

Budwig, Michaels, and Kasmer (2014/2015), for

example, described challenges in implementing Clark

University’s initiative to increase “integrative learning

and effective practice” (p. 20). Our challenges are

shared in the hope that others might learn from them

and how we responded. Overall, our initiatives led to

successful innovations and changes on our campuses,

so some of those are indicated as well.

Literature Review

In 2007, the National Leadership Council for LEAP

issued “College Learning for the New Global Century,” a

report on the LEAP initiative two years after it was

launched by AAC&U to re-envision liberal learning in the

21

st

century. The report designated integrative learning as

an essential learning outcome for this new vision of

undergraduate education. Integrative learning, defined as

“the ability to make, recognize, and evaluate connections

among disparate concepts, fields, or contexts” (Huber,

Hutchings, Gale, Miller, & Breen, 2007, p. 46), was at the

center of our work on this grant project. Reflecting on the

challenges students face making sense of a complex world

of information, Debra Humphreys (2005) observed that

“integrative learning is essential to prepare students to deal

effectively both with complex issues in their working lives

and the challenges facing the broader society today and in

the future” (p. 30). Further, as AAC&U (2015) made clear

in its report on general education, the general education

curriculum is particularly important for integrative

learning because it offers students the opportunity to

integrate their learning across multiple fields, something

that “helps students build the broad and integrative

knowledge they need for their careers” (p. 5).

The National Leadership Council for LEAP (2015)

also identified a central problem with higher education:

the lack of a coherent educational plan for students.

Instead, students “are working to cobble together a

sufficient number of course that will enable them to

meet the required number of credits … necessary to

earn a degree” (p. 29). The report noted that responding

to this concern required concrete effort to help students

connect their intentional learning experiences across the

curriculum as well as their learning in the classroom

with activities outside the classroom (p. 37). As

Robbins (2014) argued, however, “integral liberal

learning involves planned, strategic programming of

educational opportunities for students” (p. 28),

suggesting a key role for academic advising because

“academic advisors stand at the crossroads of all

curricular, cocurricular, and extracurricular avenues

available for students” (p. 29). White and Schulenberg

(2012) also noted the significance of academic advising

for helping students “thin[k] about the larger purposes

of their educations,” arguing that “when academic

advising is conceived and supported as an academic

endeavor,” it can help students “integrate their

educational experiences, reflect on their learning, and

articulate and demonstrate their growth” (p. 11).

Component #1: Structuring Curricular Connections

From the beginning of this project, our work rested

on two convictions. The first is that the curricular

coherence that matters most is the coherence that each

Babyak Delivering the Promise of Liberal Arts 64

student achieves by integrating their learning and

developing a coherent understanding of their education.

The second is, as Randy Bass (2012) argued, that we

cannot leave the work of integrating learning across the

curriculum solely up to students. Instead,

we must fully grasp that students will learn to

integrate deeply and meaningfully only insofar as

we design a curriculum that cultivates that; and

designing such a curriculum requires that we

similarly plan, strategize and execute integratively

across the boundaries within our institutions. (p. 32)

However, the challenge we encountered was how to do

that in ways that work for our institutions. Do we create

formal structures, or do we help students identify and

explore the connections that exist across curricular and

co-curricular boundaries? The experiences of two

partners, one who took a highly structured route, and one

who took a relatively unstructured but guided approach,

and the outcomes for each are described below.

Ohio Wesleyan University: Structured Connections

The first, a highly structured approach, was

already underway when we began the grant project.

Indeed, Ohio Wesleyan’s (OWU) innovative course

networks, combining coursework and co-curricular

activities, served as the inspiration for each

institution’s early work on structuring curricular

connections. These course networks were one part of

OWU’s signature program, the OWU Connection.

Course networks were organized around a common

theme, allowing students to study a topic or problem

from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and to

integrate the perspectives into a coherent and complex

understanding of the topic. The idea was not that each

institution would recreate OWU’s model, but that each

institution would explore the best ways to structure

pathways for students through their non-major work to

enhance their ability to examine topics or issues from

a variety of perspectives, while also using this as an

opportunity to at least partly complete general

education requirements.

Of particular interest to the partners was OWU’s

model of connecting co-curricular activities with the

course networks, something participants had uniformly

described as especially rewarding. As the grant partners

were commencing this work, OWU was examining its

early assessments of the course connections program.

What OWU learned was that while student learning and

faculty teaching experiences were positive, students found

it difficult to complete all of the elements of the course

networks. Faculty also found it difficult to sustain the

connected co-curricular activities given the range of

demands on their time. This led OWU to rethink the

concept of course networks. Instead of offering structured

networks driven by synergies in faculty expertise, the

faculty decided to guide students to help them make

innovative connections in their own journeys through the

OWU curriculum and experiential learning opportunities.

This effort inspired a more comprehensive review of the

college ecosystem, including attention to structural

obstacles to collaboration for both students and faculty. It

also included a review of faculty workload and faculty

evaluation processes as well as broader questions about

strategic planning and faculty governance.

1

After

conducting this thorough institutional review, OWU

developed a plan for better and more sustainably

integrating the OWU Connection. Recently, the faculty

approved a newly tightened definition of what it calls a

connection experience, which places emphasis on

experiential learning and individualized student reflection.

Allegheny College: Student-Developed Connections

If OWU initially sought to help students link

curricular and co-curricular activities in a highly

structured way, Allegheny College’s approach to

fostering linkages between students’ curricular and co-

curricular work was less so. The approach centered on

concentrations, a new program designed to help students

link academic pursuits of the classroom with

opportunities in career education, internships, study

away, civic learning, and community programming.

Concentrations encouraged students to organize their

educational experience around a theme and supplement

that effort with relevant co-curricular activities. Students

gathered together courses, events and performances,

research projects, presentations and lectures, workshops,

study away experiences, and other activities and focused

them on a specific societal issue or challenge. A total of

six concentrations were developed: Law and Policy,

Food Studies, Peace and Conflict, Science and Society,

Inequalities, and Health and the Human Condition.

Operationally, students interested in one of the

concentration topics would meet regularly with faculty

and staff in a group advising setting. Students were to

demonstrate a pattern of participation in relevant

curricular and co-curricular offerings, and then produce a

series of reflections on those experiences that connect in

an overarching narrative. Ideally, the narrative would

take the form of an electronic portfolio and inform the

student’s pursuit of post-graduate opportunities (i.e.,

fellowships, graduate school, or career), but the student’s

participation in a concentration per se would not be

documented on the transcript.

1

See Ferren and Paris (2015) regarding the need for “appropriate

governance structures” so that “efforts to implement and extend

integrative liberal learning are sustainable and institutionalized” (p. 13).

Babyak Delivering the Promise of Liberal Arts 65

Instead of being structured by the faculty, however,

concentrations were intended to be student-centered and

developed, and they were designed to help students to

more coherently connect work they were already engaged

in. This required an attitudinal shift on the part of the

students from completing requirements to connecting

learning experiences and thinking about how to apply their

liberal arts learning to career/life/flourishing beyond

college. In developing concentrations in this way,

Allegheny sought to provide faculty support for student

initiative but not a fixed set of required courses or

experiences. For some students, this model of making

thematic connections across their curricular and co-

curricular work without the structural support of required

courses was successful. For many students, however, there

was not enough structure. This experience led Allegheny

to ask how to develop institutional structures that foster

student ownership of a coherent educational experience,

rather than hinder engagement/exploration through

requirements or rigid structures.

Allegheny College: Shift to Student Advising Courses

Allegheny’s wrestling with this question led it to

focus on the group advising that had supported the

Concentrations program. In these meetings, faculty and

staff had been successful in helping students to better

link their coursework with various other high-impact

learning opportunities they were pursuing. Allegheny

decided to formalize this group advising work and

developed two new group advising courses, Gateway

100 and Gateway 300. Gateway 100, Who Are You and

What Do You Want to Become? is aimed at first- and

second-year students and is designed to help them

investigate curricular and co-curricular opportunities

related to their interests and develop appropriate

pathways so that these opportunities build upon and

enrich one another. Gateway 300, What Have You

Learned and Where are You Going? is aimed at third-

and fourth-year students and designed to help them

develop a personal narrative of their college work as

well as articulate a clear professional goal and a process

by which they might achieve it.

Both Gateway 100 and Gateway 300 are 1-

credit courses offered on a pass/fail basis, and both

are taught by a team of one faculty member and one

member of the staff. Concentrations became options

that students can complete in relation to a

connected Gateway 100 course, or they can

complete a Gateway 100 course that is open in its

focus. Overall, student feedback to the Gateway 100

and 300 courses has been overwhelmingly positive,

and students felt strongly that these courses

provided them with the space and guidance to

explore their interests and education in ways that

might not otherwise happen.

These two initiatives, in complementary ways,

explored the practical limits of structured pathways and

guided pathways designed to enhance curricular

coherence. Their experiences helped other partners in

the choices they made regarding structuring

connections for students. Oberlin, for example, decided

to expand on its offerings of its own version of

concentrations, which are essentially interdisciplinary

minors. These concentrations are composed mostly of

courses already offered in the curriculum and typically

include a required overview course and a culminating

experience. The College of Wooster pursued a different

path and chose to enhance curricular coherence by

reviewing its overall curriculum and revising its general

education requirements for graduation.

Component #2: Finding and Sustaining Connections

This section highlights the experiences of two

institutions, Oberlin College and Kenyon College. The

first, Oberlin, had already developed a highly

innovative, searchable online mapping tool that charted

curricular content and area expertise across the

institution, which served as an initial model for online

mapping tools for the grant. The second, Kenyon,

developed an entirely new online advising and

comprehensive institutional mapping tool to enhance

students’ ability to design coherent pathways through

the institution and connect those pathways with co-

curricular and experiential opportunities. Both

examples illustrate the importance of identifying

connections not only for students but for all

stakeholders at an institution, but their differences also

illustrate what is required to effectively support

curricular coherence and integrative advising.

Oberlin College: Mapping Curricular Connections

A key to strengthening curricular coherence is the

ability to identify curricular connections. Historically,

information important to curricular coherence, such as

course content and faculty areas of expertise, was

organized largely by disciplines reflected in department

and program structures. With the growth of

interdisciplinary fields and multidisciplinary

approaches to traditional fields, it is now often less

apparent where curricular connections exist. Oberlin

had developed an interactive web-based tool, known as

ObieMAPS, that mapped the curriculum as well as

faculty and staff expertise by location, time period,

theme, and language. ObieMAPS made the links among

courses, faculty, and staff readily visible by storing

information by course topic and intellectual or artistic

project rather than by disciplinary field. Interest in

ObieMAPS was strong, and Oberlin was prepared to

share this tool widely.

Babyak Delivering the Promise of Liberal Arts 66

Here again, there were lessons to be learned. The

first lesson learned was that, while Oberlin had

developed the tool with open source software and was

willing to share its unique integration of this software,

ObieMAPS itself was designed to be integrated with a

variety of proprietary software programs at Oberlin for

information feeds and other functions. This meant that

sharing of the ObieMAPS software would be challenging

at best. At a workshop on ObieMAPS attended by IT

professionals from partner institutions, it became clear

that partners would be better served by developing their

own programs than by trying to mesh a version of

ObieMAPS with their own software support services.

The second lesson learned was that ObieMAPS had

been designed to identify curricular connections, and for the

most part it was exceedingly good at doing this; however, it

had not been designed with an interface that encouraged its

use for academic advising. It soon became apparent that

partners wanting to use online mapping tools would need to

develop or use online tools that incorporated mapping

capacities but were designed to function as advising tools as

well. Eventually, Oberlin decided to discontinue support for

ObieMAPS because of its limited advising capabilities and

instead adopted an online advising tool with capacities for

curricular integration, electronic portfolios, and ease of

connection across institutional offices.

Kenyon College: Comprehensive Online Integration

Kenyon College’s vision for its online tool was

expansive. Seeking to ensure that its students would

feel empowered and supported in creating, connecting,

and completing their academic and related objectives,

Kenyon developed Kenyon Compass in collaboration

with Pragya Systems. Kenyon Compass was designed

to facilitate the integration of all aspects of a students’

educational experience. This comprehensive online tool

identifies connections not only across campus—

including many campus offices that provide services to

students—but also among community and service

learning opportunities, internships, and other high-

impact practices. This multifaceted tool also includes a

robust course and catalog search function to assist

students and faculty in course planning and registration.

Kenyon Compass also allows students to connect their

curricular and co-curricular activities to career planning,

allowing them to easily see connections between

coursework and other learning experiences such as summer

research fellowships and internships. Moreover, it provides

data about the paths from particular majors to careers as

well as experiences reported by recent alumni, so students

can trace career trajectories based on these data and alumni

experiences. For example, Kenyon Compass users can

explore what percentage of recent history majors have

attended law school, pursued careers in secondary

education, or become journalists.

Key to Kenyon’s efforts in the development and

implementation of this comprehensive online tool for

campus-wide adoption was its early articulation of

goals and objectives as well as transparency throughout

the process. Stakeholders were encouraged to offer

suggestions for improvement, and developers of the

tool sought to address questions as they arose.

Component #3: Focusing on the Student

As important as it is to provide curricular structures

to increase curricular coherence, and to make it possible

for students and faculty to identify connections that

exist, steps must also be taken to help students integrate

their learning and develop a coherent understanding of

their education. Integrative learning occurs, above all,

when students make connections across varied learning

experiences and contexts. Because advisors stand at the

nexus among curricular, co-curricular, and experiential

learning opportunities, they are best positioned to help

students make choices that build on their previous

experiences and courses. They are also well placed to

ask students to reflect on their learning and experiences

in relation to their interests and aspirations. Advisors

can challenge students to tackle complex problems and

be adaptable, and they can initiate and shape integrative

learning by helping students make reasoned choices and

reflect upon their learning. To support integrative

learning, then, helping students achieve a sense of

coherency requires attention to academic advising and

tools that support advising.

The College of Wooster: Advising Electronic

Portfolios

At the start of the project, the grant partners wanted

to learn more from Denison University and The College

of Wooster about the work they had already

collaborated on to design holistic, integrative advising

programs, and also on the strides The College of

Wooster had made in using educational portfolios as a

way to make the outcomes of liberal education visible

to students and to help them integrate their own

educational experiences. We were particularly

interested in the possibilities that a strategic use of

student electronic portfolios could play first in

enhancing students’ abilities to intentionally map out a

path through the curriculum and co-curricular

opportunities, and then in encouraging them to reflect

deeply on their educational experiences.

Wooster’s strong commitment to using electronic

portfolios to enhance students’ educational experiences

focused on first-year students. After a successful pilot

program, Wooster implemented the use of electronic

portfolios for academic advising by all first-year

students. This support included an intensive orientation

Babyak Delivering the Promise of Liberal Arts 67

session with faculty and peer mentors to help them

establish their portfolios as well as continued work with

their academic advisors during their first year. What

Wooster learned over time, however, was that once this

level of support diminished, students were less likely to

continue using their electronic portfolios. One factor that

likely contributed to this drop in usage was that the

portfolios were not integrated with the course

management system, so they felt like an add-on to users.

They also did not appear to meet a perceived need on the

part of students. So, after a 3-year implementation

period, Wooster decided to redirect its efforts away from

electronic portfolios for advising and towards rethinking

advising and advising tools from the student perspective.

Because of the grant project, partners were able to

learn two things from Wooster’s experience. First, it

demonstrated that even with strong institutional

support, advising tools are only helpful if students find

them to be so. For the partners interested in using

electronic portfolios for advising, the message was clear

that a stand-alone version was not likely to be

successful unless students saw it as helpful. However,

Wooster’s response to this experience was also

instructive. If students did not see the value in

electronic portfolios for advising purposes, Wooster

wanted to know what they would find valuable. To

determine this, they organized a summer research group

composed of four students and two faculty and led by

associate deans of academic advising. The charge for

this group was to take a design-thinking approach to

determine how faculty and staff could advise and

mentor students so that they could develop an

integrated academic plan that would help them achieve

the college’s learning goals and prepare them for their

future. The research group learned that students were

open to advising tools but did not want them to replace

the close relationships they had with the academic

advisors. They also wanted tools to be integrated into

systems they already used. As a result of this research,

Wooster modified its advising guidelines for faculty

who teach in their First-Year Seminar program and

serve as first-year student advisors and decided to

explore the integration of advising tools already being

used into their course management system.

Denison University: Integrative Advising and “The

Wheel”

Denison’s work on integrative advising in the

project included two components. Denison had

already begun to shift its academic advising to a

more holistic, integrative model though the

development of a group advising approach called

advising circles. These advising circles are one-

credit courses in which a faculty member meets with

a group of first-year students over the course of a

semester to guide the students through their

transition to college and help them understand the

importance of developing a sense of coherence in

their curricular and co-curricular work. This program

includes faculty development with training on how to

guide integrative learning. Over the first few years of

the grant project, interest grew to the point that

currently over 75% of the first-year class takes an

advising circles course. The program also grew to

include an emphasis on mentoring in addition to

advising, with support to help faculty and staff

develop as effective mentors to promote integrative

learning and assist students in connecting their

learning with their academic, personal, and

professional growth. Early evidence suggests that

participation in an advising circle is viewed

positively by students and may raise the first-year

retention rate. The growth of advising circles

demonstrated the importance of helping students

integrate their educational experiences.

To support students further, Denison developed

an advising tool designed to both facilitate their

curricular planning and increase students’ ability to

see connections across their myriad experiences.

Called “The Wheel,” the tool was developed by the

offices of the Provost, Student Development, and

First-Year Programs in collaboration with Information

Technology. The Wheel is based on Denison’s four

learning goals for students and expands to identify the

core learning outcomes associated with each goal. As

an electronic tool, students can enter the curricular,

co-curricular, and experiential learning achievements

that contribute to their learning outcomes and goals.

This creates a visible representation of their ongoing

achievements that can serve as the basis of advising

and planning activities, inform future choices, and

help connect learning experiences with personal and

professional goals.

The Role of Assessment in Advancing the Project

Our project included ongoing assessment of both

student and faculty attitudes toward and adoption of

curricular coherence practices. An institutional

researcher led and evaluated separate surveys of

student groups on five campuses in 2015 and 2017,

and one survey of faculty on each campus in 2017.

These surveys helped campuses assess faculty-buy-in,

how students and faculty understood and defined

curricular coherence, and whether or not students were

discussing and pursuing strategies of coherence

independently. As a result, we were able to observe

positive shifts in students’ thinking about (a) the value

of advising; (b) relying less on fellow students in

choosing a course outside their major and more on

their advisor; and (c) a growing appreciation of the

Babyak Delivering the Promise of Liberal Arts 68

value of general education courses in skills associated

with the liberal arts, including critical thinking,

problem-solving, and transferring knowledge to new

situations. For example, students generally reported

relying more on their advisors regarding course

selection in 2017 than in 2015. In addition,

appreciation for the value of general education courses

was higher in students who participated in grant

initiatives than for those who did not.

Essential in this shift of thinking was more

consistent advocacy for the general curriculum and the

liberal arts by faculty, which was reported by both

faculty and students. Faculty survey responses included

identification of what they did to help students

understand the value of connections between courses in

their advising, their course syllabi, and the design of

courses where the content progresses from one to

another. Faculty also articulated the need for continued

evaluation of their college’s curricular structures to help

students make connections and engage in courses across

the curriculum. In addition, faculty responses indicated

support for helping students build intentional learning

plans to thoughtfully navigate their courses of study,

which will in turn prepare them for post-graduate

success. Finding a common way to describe coherence

and developing a consistent set of arguments for deeper

and intentional engagement in courses outside the major

in two principal points of contact between faculty and

students—syllabi and advising—emerged as a post-grant

action item for our campuses. Such an action will not

only incentivize students to embrace diversifying their

studies intentionally but can also supply arguments to

share with family and future employers about the “what”

and “why” of their education.

The Role of Cross-Institutional Collaboration

The collaborative structure of this grant experience

served participating institutions extremely well. Having

the opportunity to learn about challenges and successes

from other institutions reinforced our appreciation of the

value of working closely on aligned goals with creative,

dedicated, and generous partners. The individual activities

undertaken by each campus were developed to meet the

needs of each campus, but they were often inspired and

informed by the work of other partners. With this

structured opportunity to learn from one another, we were

able to direct our energies on initiatives most likely to

succeed, thus making our work more efficacious overall.

Because our collaboration itself was so successful, a few

words are in order about the two key collaborative

elements: (a) the multi-campus workshops and (b) the

leadership management group and how it supported our

work. Finally, it is important to reflect on the role The Five

Colleges of Ohio consortium played in supporting our

work under this grant.

Leveraging Collaboration: Multi-Campus

Workshops

Overall, we held seven multi-campus workshops—

three under the planning grant and four under the

implementation grant. Each of our planning grant

workshops focused on one of the three initiatives of the

grant. However, to inaugurate our work on curricular

coherence under the grant, we began our first multi-campus

workshop with a surprisingly broad and ranging discussion

of what is meant by curricular coherence. This discussion

proved instructive throughout the grant process. We learned

from the discussion that, while we could develop a common

vocabulary around curricular coherence, coherence as a

concept is elusive and its meaning is highly dependent on

context and use. In other words, we learned that we were

embarking on a project during which we would have to

continually articulate what we meant by “coherence”

relative to each particular context, whether in conversations

with students and faculty or in our assessment instruments.

We also had four multi-campus workshops during

the implementation grant period. Information about the

workshops can be found in Appendix A. Participants at

these workshops included a mix of faculty and staff

who attended several workshops as well as those who

attended only one but were involved in grant-related

initiatives on their home campuses. Campus

representatives issued open invitations to the multi-

campus workshops, but they also targeted faculty and

staff who served on key committees or who had shown

particular interest in campus initiatives to attend the

workshops. For each workshop, one or two campuses

took the lead in developing the agenda with substantial

input from representatives from each campus. Each

workshop featured a keynote speaker or workshop

facilitators who addressed curricular challenges from

the perspective of higher education and invited

participants to engage new ideas. Each workshop also

included reports by campus representatives on grant

initiatives, a session designed to allow faculty and staff

from the six partner institutions to learn from one

another, and dedicated time for attendees to gather with

their colleagues from their own institution to discuss

ways that their initiatives could benefit from workshop

content. These gatherings also laid the foundation for

fruitful future collaborations by fostering many

connections among faculty and staff across

participating institutions.

Leveraging Collaboration: Associate Deans and

Provosts Management Group

We knew from the start that maintaining strong

lines of communication would be essential to moving

forward with our projects, and it was necessary that

such communication was led by institutional

Babyak Delivering the Promise of Liberal Arts 69

representatives empowered with moving forward

complex project elements, from new online advising

systems to the design and listing of new courses. In

order to accomplish these goals and stay on plan, we

developed what we considered to be an essential

practice: a monthly conference call of our associate

deans and provosts group, the principal investigator, the

grant institutional researcher, and the Executive

Director of the Ohio Five. Having these regularly

scheduled opportunities for discussion strengthened our

work, whether it concerned the generation of ideas for

multi-campus workshops or support for individual

initiatives. About half of each conference call was

devoted to campus reports. Several of the individual

initiatives undertaken by campuses were shaped by the

campus updates on these phone calls, after which

representatives would consult with and sometimes visit

partner campuses to learn more about initiatives or to

undertake joint ventures. Representatives also

strategized on ways to help faculty reflect on and buy

into campus initiatives. In short, these monthly calls

fostered a sense of community that encouraged creative

collaborations in addition to providing team support.

(See Appendix B for the management group members.)

Leveraging Collaboration: The Consortial Factor

Officially, The Five Colleges of Ohio served as

the fiscal agent for the grant. That in itself was an

enormous benefit to the project. Having the

consortium coordinate the financial operations

removed that burden from any one of the six campuses

and thereby fostered a sense of equity within the

group. However, the value added did not rest solely on

the fiscal management provided by the consortium but

benefited from its consortial connection in two

additional ways. First, with extensive experience in

guiding collaborations, the Executive Director

2

was a

steady source of both practical knowledge and what

can best be thought of as a guiding vision. The

practical knowledge included experience not just with

fiscal matters but also with the best practices for

planning group events, some of which were attended

by as many as 90 people from the six institutions.

Even more important was the guiding vision that the

director provided, helping the campus partners shift

perspective or focus in on details in order to address

challenges both large and small. Secondly, the

consortium provided a pathway to top decision makers

at the five colleges. The principal investigator and the

associate deans and provosts group were regular

2

Over the course of the grant, we had the opportunity to work with two

Executive Directors: Susan Palmer was the Executive Director during

the first half of the project, until her retirement; Sarah Stone was the

Executive Director during the second half of our project.

participants in meetings of the Ohio Five Academic

Committee of deans and provosts. Results of the

report were also brought forward to the Five Colleges

of Ohio Board of Trustees, which consists of the

presidents of the five member institutions. These

conversations in turn strengthened the support for

grant initiatives across the board.

Changing the way that an institution structures its

curriculum, how faculty talk about the curriculum and

its goals, and the tools and practices of academic

advising are not for the faint of heart. An institution

aspiring to do any of the above often instinctively turns

to the field looking for examples or advice. In our case,

approaching these ambitious issues together, over time,

allowed us to fashion individual solutions appropriate

to each campus culture while sharing in a common

purpose of curricular coherence to create opportunities

for integrative learning for students. We gained strength

and courage to experiment, scrap, and redesign

unproductive ideas, and move forward quickly when we

found common productive ground. As we helped our

students and faculty find meaningful connections in

their course of study, together we, in the words of the

Ohio Five motto, “accomplished those things together

that we could not do alone.”

Conclusion

We began this project with a commitment to

enhance curricular coherence by supporting

integrative learning for our students on three fronts:

structuring curricular connections, finding and

sustaining connections, and focusing on students.

Through these components, we explored ways to (a)

create pathways through the general curriculum; (b)

use online tools to make visible curricular, co-

curricular, and experiential learning connections; and

(c) help students develop intentional and coherent

understandings of their own educational experiences

through individual and structured advising. While we

did not put it this way at the time, it is now clear that

the three components of our project were scaffolding

to support integrative learning so that integration

would be “not an isolated event but a regular part of

intellectual life” (Huber, Hutchings, & Gale, 2005, p.

6) for our students. Our rich collaborative experiences

in this work, with our partners and with key

stakeholders on our campuses, strengthened our

efforts to help students develop a capacity for

integrative liberal learning. As Ferren and Paris (2015)

pointed out, “Integrative liberal learning catalyzes a

process of intellectual and personal growth by

providing students with opportunities and guidance to

make sense of the world and their place in it” (p. 2). In

other words, our work on this project enhanced our

ability to deliver on the promise of the liberal arts.

Babyak Delivering the Promise of Liberal Arts 70

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____________________________

JOYCE KLOC BABYAK is Associate Professor of

Religion at Oberlin College where she teaches in the

area of religious social ethics. She is the author of

Finite, Contingent, and Free: A New Ethics of

Acceptance. Her research interests include literature

and ethics as well as war and peace ethics. Her recent

article, “Christian Commitments to Political

Nonviolence: When Jewish and Muslim Perspectives

Make a Difference,” is forthcoming from the Journal

of Religious Ethics. While serving as project director

for the Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence

grant from The Teagle Foundation, she was Senior

Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and then Dean of

Studies at Oberlin College.

Author’s Note

The grant collaborators and I would like to

acknowledge The Teagle Foundation for its generous

support of our work to enhance curricular coherence.

The Teagle Foundation’s leadership in supporting the

growth and development of the liberal arts through

collaborative work is extraordinary, and our institutions

are grateful for the opportunities that their grant

created. We would also like to acknowledge the

guidance that we received from our program officer,

Loni Bordoloi Pazach.

I would like to thank the recent members of the

associate deans and provosts management team

whose work brought our project to a successful

conclusion and whose ideas and reports contributed

to this article, as well as the former members who

developed and launched early grant initiatives.

Please see Appendix B for a full list of the

management team members.

Correspondence concerning this article should be

addressed to Joyce Kloc Babyak, Department of

Religion, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 44074. Email:

[email protected]u

Anyone wishing to review the survey instruments

referenced in this article is welcome to contact the

author for this information.

Babyak Delivering the Promise of Liberal Arts 71

Appendix A

Multi-Campus Workshops

August 2015, Kenyon College

Facilitator: Randy Bass, Vice Provost for Education and Professor of English at Georgetown University

Topic: Ways that liberal education can renew itself in a rapidly changing landscape, emphasizing the distinctive

qualities of higher learning in a global digital ecosystem.

August 2106, Denison University

Speaker: Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University

Topic: How liberal education will help students face the challenges of the 21

st

century.

August 2107, The College of Wooster

Facilitator: Ann Ferren, Distinguished Fellow of the Association of American Colleges and Universities

Topic: Curricular coherence and integrative learning from the student perspective.

August 2108, Oberlin College

Facilitators: Randy Bass, Vice Provost for Education and Professor of English at Georgetown University, and

Christopher Steck, SJ, Associate Professor of Theology at Georgetown University (co-chairs of Georgetown’s

curricular committee)

Topic: Sustaining initiatives and cultivating a culture of innovation and implementation.

Babyak Delivering the Promise of Liberal Arts 72

Appendix B

Associate Deans and Provosts Management Team Members

Most recent members of the associate deans and provosts management team whose work brought our project to

a successful conclusion and whose ideas and reports contributed to this article: Terrence Bensel and Patrick Jackson,

Allegheny College; Catherine L. Dollard and Paul A. Djupe, Denison University; Jeffrey A. Bowman, Kenyon

College; Elizabeth Hamilton, Oberlin College; Ashley N. Biser, Ohio Wesleyan University; Bryan T. Karazsia, The

College of Wooster; and Sarah Stone, Executive Director of The Five Colleges of Ohio.

Former members of the management team whose work contributed to the development and early phases of this

project: James R. Pletcher, Denison University (retired); Ivonne M. Garcia and Brad A. Hartlaub, Kenyon College;

Steven Wojtal and Tabassum Haque, Oberlin College; Barbara S. Andereck and Martin J. Eisenberg, Ohio

Wesleyan University (formerly); Henry B. Kreuzman III, The College of Wooster; and Susan Palmer, Executive

Director of The Five Colleges of Ohio (retired).