New Agenda for Higher

Education
CHAPTER 1
PARTNERS IN FIELD: PART 1

Six Syllabi
Over the first two chapters, six partners from the Mind and Practice seminar, each being experts
in their field, discuss their courses and their syllabus.
Each professor discusses institutional challenges and professional imperatives to give
educational experiences to the students that anticipate their future lives.
These professors are responding to the demands of responsible judgment by asking the
questions:
For what and to whom will each teachers students become responsible?
How should each teacher respond pedagogically?
To what extent do the institutional constraints of each department or discipline sustain or limit
meaningful engagement with these responsibilities?

Issues in Jewish Ethics by Rabbi Elliot

Dorff
This is a course taught by Rabbi Dorff which takes place within a rabbi students fourth or fifth
year of study. This course provides students with a guided overview to responsible practices
using reasoning based on the morals of a Jewish community.
4 goals of the class
1.
2.
3.
4.

Gain knowledge of Jewish and general ethical theory

Learn about the problems and methods of deriving moral guidance from Jewish tradition.
Analyze specific moral issues from the standpoint of Jewish tradition
Develop the skills to carry out a Jewish analyst of moral issue on their own.

Issues in Jewish Ethics (cont.)

Course methods
Three broad topics for course discussion
Matters of life and death
Problems of sex and family life
Issues in social ethics

Discussion process
Each class begins by a single student being asked to state the current issue or problem at hand.
Another student is asked to summarize the argument through the point of view from the reading.
Other students can then offer corrections or refinements to the arguments.
To each argument students can then pose consequences to the position.
When further readings are added through the course, the students are then asked how each other author would respond to the
current issue or problem.

These discussions bring to light multiple perspectives and how to respond to them using Jewish
tradition as a guide.

Issues in Jewish Ethics (cont.)

The classroom discussions are to prepare them for their final paper in which students are asked
to choose any contemporary issue and give a Jewish analysis of it.
Students must orient and justify themselves with ongoing historical tradition in order to fully back up
their arguments and solutions to these contemporary problems.

Dorff wants his students to leave his class with instantiated Jewish moral thought processes and
be able to enable others to come to terms with what one aught to care about as a Jewish agent
and how to do so.

Ethics and Law by Arthur Elstein

This course is for second-year medical students where students are engaged in ethical dilemmas
that they may face in their medical practice. Dilemmas in the course come from real life
situations in which there is no correct way to handle the situation. This is contrary to the
practical practice and heavily scientific instruction they were given in their first year.
Responsible practice in the medical field also demands that professionals are able to make strong and
reasonable ethical judgments when presented with dilemmas. For example, these skills are needed
when commitment to practice is conflicted, such as when practice states that an anencephalic babys
organs should be harvested to help other babies. But it is difficult to determine if a baby is actually brain
dead or not within the first 7 days, yet this is the amount of time allotted to decide if the babies organs
will be harvested or not.

Ethics and Law (cont.)

Assignments and classroom discussion
Each week, students are asked to attend a weekly lecture to introduce a topic, readings, case for
discussion, and the writing assignment.
The weekly writing assignments present a similar issue to the one discussed in the lecture they
attended. The assignment presents multiple questions for them to answer to solve the ethical dilemma
they are presented in order to come to a ethical conclusion to the problem.
For example, one case offers a issue of continuing treatment for a terminally ill patient where the treatment will no longer have
effect. On one hand the professionals suggest stopping the treatment, whereas the family of the patient insist that the treatment
continues.

The classroom discussions following the assignment bring to light multiple conclusions and perspectives
on the issues at hand. Students learn to articulate their arguments, defend their arguments, as well as
find consequences in their peers reasoning.

Ethics and Law (cont.)

Students in this course are not proficient in their medical craft yet, therefore, they think about
these dilemmas from a less technical perspective and a more ethical and humanistic
perspective.
The purpose of this is to understand ethical dilemma outside of the spectrum of medical practice. As
they continue their education in concrete practices, they will have a foundation of ethical reason in
order to sustain ethical reasoning techniques in their day to day practice.

Foundations of Modern Education by

Barbara Stengel
In modern education, there is a struggle between teaching the curriculum appropriately and
preparing students for their standardized test in order to improve scores for the schools overall.
This course attempts to look at the practical reason of future professionals in the education
system. These professionals must decide what is in the best interest of the students while still
remaining loyal to what the school wants.
Stengels course is a sophomore level course aimed to help students learn how to interperate
professional situations and come up with solutions that are remaining mindful of psychological,
sociocultural, and political context of action.

Foundations of Modern Education (cont.)

Courses six themes to help her students understanding of what is salient for professional action
as teachers.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Perspective, power, and responsibility in teaching and learning.

Where did our schools come from? Historical perspectives on schooling.
Equity and diversity: Sociocultural and socioeconomic perspectives on schooling.
Power and education: Political perspectives on schooling.
Is this how it ouhgt to be? Philosophical perspectives on schooling.
Perspecives, power, and response-ability revisited.

These themes are set up in such a way for the student to build upon their current understanding
of education and to make sense of the perspectives from both a students and a professionals
point of view.

Foundations of Education (cont.)

Self Assessment
Throughout the course, students partake in two types of self assessment: a end of the course portfolio
and essay that provides information about how they have grown through the course and how they see
themselves as prospective teachers.

Over the three courses presented in this chapter, we see how the professors foster an
environment of practical reason and responsible/ethical judgement.

New Agenda for Higher

Education
CHAPTER 2
PARTNERS IN FIELD: PART 2

Engineering Cultures by Gary Downey

Professor Downey challenges his students in the first assignment of the course to better
understand why they have chosen the engineering field.
He asks questions such as, describe what images challenged you when deciding to enter in to this major,
and, how did this images challenge you? He also asked about how their friends and family challenged
them to enter the field.
This is unlike other engineering assignments where students are asked to analyze or problem solve.
What Downey wants the students to understand is how they themselves fit into the field that they have
chosen and how this will impact he social world.

Engineering Cultures (cont.)

Downey suggest that students cannot understand and succeed in the field of engineering if they
do not first understand the culture they are working in and the social environment they are
looking to enhance. One cannot truly solve problems in the most successful way if they do not
understand the culture in which they are trying to problem solve for.
Downey enriches his students with knowledge of different engineering styles and history from
all over the world. This helps the students become more aware of how to problem solve in
different countries around the world based on their engineering techniques.

Engineering Cultures (cont.)

Assignments
Students are asked to draw stick figures of an engineer from Japan and an engineer from the U.S. and
above them, write 5 problems that they may encounter. Then he has the students write how each
engineer would solve the other engineers problems based on their culture and their engineering
history.
In later assignments, Downey has the students write dialogs of conversations that they may have with
engineers from different counties. He also has the students problem solve from these alternative points
of view.

The purpose of these assignments is to get students thinking about cultural design and how to
evaluate issues through a cultural lens. This allows students to be able to work all over the world
and be successful in integrating into their engineering culture.

Advanced legal Ethics by Daisy Floyd

This course, much like Downeys course on engineering, focuses on self reflection on why the
student has chosen the field they are working in. In the high demand and high stress world of
law, lawyers need to be reminded of why they entered into that career.
Recent studies have shown that alcoholism and drug use is on the rise for those among
American lawyers. Floyd attempts to respond to this crisis by engaging the students of the law
field in understanding why they are in the field. Floyd reflects on the idea that since law school
is so competitive that students lose their drive for social justice and instead fear losing their rank
in their profession.
Floyd believes that the first step to overcoming the crises that lawyers are currently facing is to
remove them from the idea that they are competitive with one another and instead introduce
them to a classroom where they will be learning from each other so trust can be built.

Advanced Legal Ethics (cont.)

One of the first assignments that Floyd has the students work on is coming up with the design of
a law school with no limitations. They are able to say what type of student is admitted to the
school, what type of classes they can take, where the law school would be located, what point in
someones lifetime that they would be able to go to law school, and finally, why the students are
attending law school. This allows the students to evaluate themselves as students as well as
choose what type of community they want to be a part of.
Another assignment encourages interactions with current lawyers who have been in the field for
a number of years. The students are able to appriciate the demands of being a lawyer while also
understanding how the live well within the lawyer lifestyle.

Advanced Legal Ethics (cont.)

Just like the students of Rabbitcal studies under Rabbi Dorff, as well as other courses discussed,
the law students need to understand that they need to educate their clients on how to think and
reason logically and ethically. To be able to do this, not only does the lawyer need to understand
their client fully, but they also need to understand themselves as lawyers.
Lawyers do not get this kind of practice in law school do to the problem with competition in
school. Through the Advance Legal Ethics course, students are able to work with each other and
gain skills in understanding each other which will eventually help them understand their clients.

Scripture and the Moral Life by William

Spohn
Scripture and the Moral Life is considered a course of the humanities department rather than
the expected theology department. This course is not necessarily a course about religion, yet a
course that extends reasoning and logic beyond ones self.
Much like Dorffs rabbi course, this course is based around contemporary issues and debars that
are thought about from a logical and religious perspective. Students are pushed to respond
creatively to these current issues from the perspective of religious tradition. The first way that
Spohn encourages this type of thought is in how he requires the students to read the scripture.
One does not simply read scripture, but they feel emotions, have a system of believes, and have
a personal reflection on the readings.
Spohn focuses on the liberal arts education in that he wants his students to be able to look at a
problem from multiple different perspectives. He wants his students to be able to self reflect on
issues and come up with creative solutions to these problems through engaged and ethical
reasoning.

A New Agenda for

Higher Education
CHAPTER 3
A NARRATIVE OF THE SEMINAR

Bringing Analogies to Light

The Life and Mind for Practice Seminar helped discover practices through which faculty could
overcome their academic isolation from one another and locate themselves within a common
struggle to prepare their students for lives of responsible judgement.
Initially, the seminar failed due to academic argumentation.
The problem lay not in any absence of goodwill of commitment but in the dominant values of
academia, namely, argumentation and identity through which professional faculty work.

Bringing Analogies to Light

Introduction to Narratives- Narratives portray protagonists who encounter and work to resolve
problems.
Chapter 3 is a narrative deconstruction of events, told with the aid of critical hindsight.
It describes how we learned to see ourselves anew through engagement with one another,
across professions and disciplines, and learned to discern and articulate new dimensions of our
own practice and values.

Opening with Great Expectations

The seminar hoped to build substantive bridges between the professions and the liberal arts
through a shared consideration of how best to teach practical reasoning within the modern
academy.
The seminar assumed that professional education is inherently liberal, with its natural
orientation towards responsibility and good judgement. Also, assuming that practical argument
of the kind that is central to work in the professions ought to be central to pedagogy in the
liberal arts when the goal is creating responsible citizens.
Critical hindsight suggests that the initial attempts to engage faculty in their various disciplines
failed to open meaningful dialogue due to limitations set by the very people attempting to
espouse practical reasoning.

Overcoming the Academic Tradition of

Argument
Academic argumentation decontextualizes knowledge in order to permit its widest
generalizations.
Sociologist Randall Collins notes, the academic mode of knowledge production presupposes that
ideas are meant to be true or significant apart from any locality, and apart from anyone
concretely putting them into practice.
Basically, the academic mode of argument tends to reduce uncertain and problematic situations
in the world to the realm of unreason, the practical mode embraces situations as the enabling
occasions for inquiry, dialogue, and action.

Overcoming the Academic Tradition of

Argument
In preparation of the first seminar, an essay was drafted in hopes of clarifying the concept of
practical reasoning. The essay described what humans do when they size up situations and bring
knowledge responsibly to bear.
The essay described the process of practical reasoning in three phases: 1) engagement with a
problematic, concrete situation, 2) detached interpretation and analysis of what is most salient
about the situation for action, and 3) informed and responsible engagement through judgement.

Overcoming the Academic Tradition of

Argument
The initial exercise, and subsequent failure- the seminar participants were asked to analyze a
situation where social vulnerabilities had been displayed toward a set of students.
In retrospect, their attempt to apply practical reasoning to anothers actions violated the vision
of practical engagement that the seminar had hoped to engage.
We had succeeded only in soliciting their expert advice. The predicaments and challenges of
their own teaching remained entirely opaque

Fostering Recognition and Analogy

Planning for the second meeting was a key turning point for the seminar. The approach was
changed, and instead of continuing to provide case materials, the seminars partners were asked
to make cases from their own teaching experiences.
The seminars partners were asked how the seminar might be improved upon, and the
overwhelming consensus was that future gatherings should be organized around cases from
partners own respective fields.
It was suggested that narrative provided a better basis for recognizing and articulating the
richness of one anothers pedagogical practices.

Fostering Recognition and Analogy

This suggested that the seminar could produce shared meaning only through practical reasoning
rather than by applying predefined theory about practical reasoning.
This strategy allowed participants to analyze theirs and others syllabi in order to reflect on the
forms of reasoning required for lifes challenges. These syllabi were used as narrative artifacts
that provided a guided journey into the problems and values of a discipline and that offered an
organized series of learning events that modelled responsibility activity in a given field.
It was reasoned that teach syllabus entailed some underlying conception of what is most
important for the responsible practice of a discipline or its fundamental topics.

Fostering Recognition and Analogy

Using the syllabi as cases for reflection fostered discussions and insights into the core concerns
and values that motivated the participating facultys respective courses, and members learned
to discern and articulate the differences and resemblances among their disciplines and among
the professional and the liberal arts and sciences more broadly. Looking particularly for common
issues that emerged when attempting to teach practical reasoning.
The strategy for the second seminars meeting was to pair individuals up into cross-disciplinary
groups that would establish a foundation for forming common purposes among teachers of
different disciplines.

Fostering Recognition and Analogy

The pairs discussed the kinds of situations requiring practical judgement to which their courses
respond.
They considered the journey that each syllabus organized for the lives of the students, the key
events that occur along the way, and how those events anticipate future work or life.
One grouping (Downey and Stengel), discovered a deeper analogy through their conversations,
that professional teachers are called, possibly against the grain of his or her own discipline, to
orient students growing practices for interpreting professional situations.
Another pairing discussed the unique offerings of the course Practical Wisdom, which
constituted a fascinating attempt to premise the meaning go liberal education on the
importance of practical argument, rather than the primacy of decontextualized theory.

Fostering Recognition and Analogy

Another pairing discussed the course Ethics and Public Policy helped students learn to
interpret substantive public policy disagreements about scientific and technological advances.
The use of narratives in analyzing courses provided techniques that encourage students to
consider systematically the facts involved in a particular policy argument, the stakeholders
whose interest are involved, the concepts and presuppositions that underlie their arguments,
and the decision making process through which the stakeholders stake their claims, exemplifying
the use of practical reasoning, and focusing on creating individuals concerned with social
engagement.

Fostering Recognition and Analogy

What accounted for the considerable difference in outcomes between the first and second
seminar?-Allowing faculty to use narratives to show engagement into practical reasoning.
By changing direction, we succeeded in providing a diverse set of faculty with a guided
opportunity to inquire imaginatively into each others teaching challenges in light of their
common goal of educating for responsible engagement in a particular field of practice. (p. 84)

Finding New Narratives of Faculty

Vocation and Purpose
The third session expanded the collaborative practice created in the second session.
This session introduced the use of cross-disciplinary trios who worked together to tell the story
of their respective courses and to construct a shared discourse for articulating their growing
identities as teachers. The trios introduced these concepts to the broader group, in order to
forge a sense of group identity.
The third session expanded on the findings of the second, that practical reasoning was a
dramatic process of interpreting the salience of lived situation and responding in ways that
produce virtuous consequences in the lives of both self and others.

Finding New Narratives of Faculty

Vocation and Purpose
The seminars participants were asked to complete an assignment, which asked each teacher to
recount the narrative of their syllabus. To create a plot with a beginning, middle and an end; by
thinking about courses in a narrative form, they could inquire into what the protagonist (the
students) actually do over time.
The syllabi became documents that organized progressive series of problematic episodes that
students resolve through practical reasoning and deliberation, stimulating thereby their growth
in the techniques and values of a field.
Narratives offered a helpful framing device for discussing practical reasoning as a purpose and
existential enterprise and for reflecting on the quality of the experiences afforded students by
each syllabus.

Finding New Narratives of Faculty

Vocation and Purpose
The trio members walked one another through their respective syllabus narratives and helped
one another reflect on how their engagement together, across disciplines and the professionalliberal education divide, renewed or transformed their own pedagogical thinking and purpose.

Fashioning a Shared Framework Dialogue

The third session created a new framework for considering the challenges of teaching practical
judgment- a framework that posed a strong challenge to the typical educational agendas of
contemporary academe.
The example of Daisy Hurst Floyds course Advanced Legal Ethics provides a good exampled of
a narrative told to broaden the students personal visions of whats necessary to be a good
lawyer.
Floyd presented her syllabus to her trio; from which they found the topics of authenticity,
community, client autonomy, and legal bodies of knowledge to be applicable to the teachings of
practical reasoning.

Fashioning a Shared Framework Dialogue

It was further suggested that Floyds syllabus on the topics of authenticity, community, client
autonomy, and legal bodies of knowledge, - suggest that the professions and the disciplines are
deeply co-implicated in the education formation of responsible actors in the world, further
displaying the ethos of critical reasoning.
Floyds narrative continued to resonate with the seminar, and the partners quickly recognized
analogies between Floyds syllabus and their own teaching.
This shared teaching narrative suggested that education in all professional fields understood the
traditional sense of liberal education, aspiring toward the formation of knowledgeable actors
in the social and cultural world. These are actors for whom the meaning of their action is tied in
some substantive way to the good of others, or the public.

Fashioning a Shared Framework Dialogue

Floyds concern for authenticity and client autonomy required some collaborative refashioning.
These topics captured well the importance of achieving a proper relationship between the good
of the self and the good of others through action, however did not necessarily cross disciplines.
One participant suggested that Floyds worry about client autonomy actually expressed a
boarder notion of ethical concern, and that not all situations required ethical concern per se;
for instance, a surgeon who worries about the equitable distribution of organs while attempting
to perform a highly technical transplant endanger his or her patients, and that the surgeon
would have acted unethically by spending her energy worrying about ethics rather than acting in
a narrowly technical fashion.
The question became, for what or whom do we engage in practice in a field. Or rather, what is
the nature of ones responsibility towards others?

Fashioning a Shared Framework Dialogue

The third session helped establish the crux of practical reasoning- Identity, community,
responsibility, and body of knowledge.
The pedagogies of the arts and sciences are well positioned to help students imagine and
interpret the institutions and context of their action, social, cultural, political, and natural; the
discipline have developed strong analytical traditions and bodies of knowledge that help
students locate themselves within broader networks of concerns.
The final session helped the participants realize the shortcomings of critical thinking, and that
responsible action that they now understood was a much broader notion.
They recognized that the critical thinkings interrogation of experience and the distillation of
underlying structures capture only a partial aspect of what teaching is all about.

A New Agenda for

Higher Education
CHAPTER 4
PRACTICAL REASON AS AN EDUCATIONAL AGENDA

Critical Thinking as an Educational

Agenda
First, an educational agenda, borrowed from Dennis McGrath and Marin B. SpearsThe
Academic Crisis of the Community College (1991) refers to the varied ways education is pictured
or enacted in particular pedagogies, and assumed in the vocabularies that faculties use to
explain and justify what they do.
Few terms are more common in contemporary discussion of the purpose of higher education
than critical thinking.
However, critical thinking is a vague and often poorly conceived notion of educational purpose,
more akin to a slogan than a well-formed educational idea.

Critical Thinking as an Educational

Agenda
Platos The Republic illustrates the difference between critical thinking, and the more socially
conscious idea of practical reasoning.
In The Republic tells of Platos Socrates, where he asks readers to imagine humanity as prisoners
in a dark, underground cave. While trapped in the dark, one prisoner is able to break free and
turns around, he finds images projected on the cave walls by flickering light. He then begins his
arduous climb towards reality, bathed by the sun. There the prisoner undergoes a
transformative illuminiation, and finds what Plato refers to as the Good, the light of all reality
(knowledge). Moved by this, the prisoner begins the long descent back into the cave.

Critical Thinking as an Educational

Agenda
Once the prisoner returns to his people, and tells them of the Good, they resist and threated to
kill him if he persists. Just as the real Athenians did to the real Socrates. Platos end result is the
creation of an educational curriculum aimed for the guardian class, who rule the rightly
ordered city that Socrates and his interlocutors have been struggling to imaging through their
dialogue.
Critical thinkings agenda has evident resemblances to the myth of the cave. Critical thinking
represents the escape of the cave, in the escape of a narrow worldview; however, the
transformative moment in the tale is missing in critical thinkings agenda. The journey is not a
one way trip, but rather a return for the good of the people.
Liberation finds its fulfillment in service.

Critical Thinking as an Educational

Agenda
How does critical thinking play out in todays academy?
Pascarella and Terenzini suggest that the term critical thinking is typically understood to mean
something like the ability to identify central issues and assumptions in an argument, recognize
important relationships, make correct inferences from data, interpret whatever conclusions are
warranted based on data, and evaluate evidence or authority.
By contrast, reflective judgment thinking in terms of interaction between the individuals
conceptual skills and environments that promote or inhibit the acquisition of these skills.
In other words, critical thinking and practical reason differ in their applications; where critical
thinking falls short, practical reason defines the process by ultimately acting for the better good
of those for whom you are responsible towards.

Critical Thinking as an Educational

Agenda
John Deweys theory of reflective thinking, pointing toward reflective judgement as a set of
flexible and growing habits, and intellectual disposition to engage with complex and uncertain
situations rather than to deny or avoid them.
The critical thinking educational agenda is uncertain in detail, Chapter 4 attempts to distill four
presuppositions of the critical thinking agenda.
1) True knowledge consists in representations derived through valid rules of inference, 2) students
proceed from black and white thinking and desire for certainty toward more subtle shades of gray, 3)
logical patterns of thinking can be taught in abstraction from particular contents, and 4) critical thinking
entails liberation from the contingencies of the particular.

Practical Reasoning as Alternative

Educational Agenda
In Platos The Republic, Socrates illustrates the difference of virtue and critical skill, noting the
two are not the same. He goes on to say that the future Guardians must not only be well formed
morally before they embark on the study of dialectic, they must also follow their dialectical
training with a long stint of supervised practical involvement in the affairs of the city.
The critical thinking agenda fails to initiate students in the culture of service, and needs
significant broadening to reconnect analytical thinking with the larger purpose of higher
education, to create just human formation.

Practical Reasoning as Alternative

Educational Agenda
Practical reason forms an alternative educational agenda, one that builds onto critical thinking,
and adds components of higher self and responsibility.
In the form in which the members of the seminar practice it, practical reasoning affirms an
emphasis, shared with proponents of the critical thinking agenda, on developing self-awareness
and the ability subject opinions to analysis and critique. The core intuition is different, as is its
larger resonance.
Practical reasoning looks on knowledge, including representational knowledge, as founded on
participation and engagement with the world. This is most evident in practical reasonings
assumption that all knowing, including criticism, takes place within particular knowledge
communities, defined by specific cognitive practices.

Practical Reasoning as Alternative

Educational Agenda
The educational goal of practical reasoning is the formation of person who think and act through
a back-and-forth dialogue between analytical thought and the ongoing constitution of meaning.
Pedagogies of practical reasoning aim at the formation of a particular kind of self: an engaged
self, who has absorbed the critical perspective without becoming identified with it.
The agenda of practical reason could be said to be about re-grounding the ideals of the
enlightenment.

Practical Reason and Contemporary

Theories of Mind
Jerome Bruner, one of the pioneers of what has been called the genitive revolution in modern
psychology, has argues two broadly different modes of thinking: Analytical, where things and
events are detached from the situations of everyday life and represented in more abstract and
systematic ways; and the narrative mode of thinking, here things and events achieve significance
by being placed within a broader story, or ongoing context of meaningful interaction.
He calls the analytical mode of reason, information processing; and he calls the narrative model,
meaning-making.

The Relevance of Practical Professional

Pedagogies for Liberal Education
The learning sciences understanding of cognitive development casts into high relief the
relevance of the professions practice-oriented pedagogies for re-orienting and revitalizing liberal
education.
Only by becoming familiar with how a particular field understands the salient dimensions of
action- identify, community, responsibility, and bodies of knowledge, is it possible for student to
develop the holistic meaning grasp of situation that marks professional expertise.
John Dewey argues that this was a shared experience, or cultural ethos, that enabled a group of
interacting investigators to perceive a situation as problematic and therefore as a stimulus to
inquire.

The Relevance of Practical Professional

Pedagogies for Liberal Education
A grasp of inquiry in its full, practical sense also offers a remedy for the widespread worry that
we live today awash in meaningless information, overwhelmed by the production of knowledge
that, in the form of weaponry and environmental degradation, threatens human survival itself.
Attending to the demands of identity, community, responsibility, and bodies of knowledge brings
alive Deweys insight that intellectual reflection- the transmuting of meaningful experience into
general concepts- is not as an end in itself. Such concepts guides for engaging a richer terrain of
experience.

Institutional Educational Agendas: What

is Higher Education For?
One of the key findings of contemporary cognitive research is how important conceptual model
are in human thinking.
These conceptual models make it possible to see beyond the uniqueness of particular aspects of
the world, toward common aspects that bind apparently unrelated patterns of experience.
In contrast to the critical thinking agenda, or the analytical model, the humanistic tradition of
liberal arts and sciences is deeply committed to the development of students capacities for the
critical interrogation of experience.
Like the professional disciplines, the humanistic tradition has been concerned historically about
engagement with the world, the situation, and other selves as well.

Institutional Educational Agendas: What

is Higher Education For?
Sociologist John Meyer provides empirical evidence that higher educations remarkable spread
around the globe during the past half-century represents the diffusion of a universalizing
cultural template. Far from being essentially utilitarian in function, higher education is best seen
as a culture-forming institution. Universities have grown ever more prestigious and important,
and they enroll ever-larger proportions of the population, eve in nations where it performs few
utilitarian function in relation to the economy.
Higher education provides an environment in which these core features of the emerging global
culture can be expounded, elaborated, applied, and internalized by students and faculty alike.
What makes university graduates desirable for jobs in most advanced sectors of the economy,
state, and society is their successful assimilation into these modern cultural assumption.

Institutional Educational Agendas: What

is Higher Education For?
The University as a culture shaping institution carries on the work of the enlightenment. Its
educational agenda is to teach analytical reasoning, the ability to transform thought and
experience from the local to the universal and general.
It carries as its correlate the idea that the individual who successful enters this culture is
transformed in mind, such persons are social actors in a very strong sense: entitled to criticize
the present an construct lives and identities of their own choosing.

Realigning Universal and Particular:

Humanistic Rhetoric and Practical Reason
The universitys exaltation of analytical reason leaves the actors that it forms with few resources
for re-entering the realm of concrete social life, for living amid particular while also striving for a
wide frame of mind and sympathy.
One key tool for analytic reason is writing
Writing is central not only in all areas of academic pursuit but also in modern work contexts, the
professions, and political activity. To bring this insight to life in the lives of students, Lauer
(faculty) organizes her syllabus exercises in three writing experiences or
acts: Questioning, Exploring, and Focusing.

Realigning Universal and Particular:

Humanistic Rhetoric and Practical Reason
The rhetorical perspective, unlike formal logic, insists that we recognize that even the most
abstruse cognitive endeavors are preformed in relation to, and with others. Lauer attempts to
focus her students writing in the context of always part of an ongoing situation.
The point, is to show students that writing is not about showing what one already knows, but
that they can learn something through writing.
She encourages in her students writing, their ability to ask questions, to use rhetorical
knowledge to explore, and to focus the experience to become more effective citizens. Or in the
case of practical reason, to become responsible for whom or what their profession calls upon.

Conclusion
A New Agenda for Higher Education focused on the narrative of actual teachers, looking at
syllabi as a case with protagonist (students) and seeking ways in which practical reason was
attributed to that particular discipline.
The seminar discovered how difficult cross-professional community building really is within the
contemporary academy and how liberating an experience it can be for faculty that participate.
The seminar criticized the institutional ground on which the partners struggle to chart lives that
are responsive to the call of responsible judgement.
As the case studies in the book demonstrate, teachers whose work embodies a strong concern
for the formation of practical responsibility often work against he grain of their own
department, disciplines, and institutions.

Conclusion
By bringing to the surface the motivating values and purposes that underlie teaching for
responsible action within an array of fields, the seminar proved an exciting opportunity for
fashioning new connections between faculty and disciplines.
By engaging the perspectives of others, our partners were able to adopt a renewed perspective
on their teaching and the structure, possibilities, and limitations of their own disciplines.
Faculty must be steeped in the practice of their disciplines and bring that practice to life for their
student, with the purpose of engaging students to become actors in their own society and
culture.
Graduate students need to be introduced to more reflective, critical;, and constructive
appreciation for the meaning of their disciplines for the lives of self and for others.
Administrative leadership must understand the promise of enrichment of institutional identity
and the relationship between intuitions and their publics in order to bring about real policies
that enhance practical reason.

Conclusion
The syllabus narrative exercise employed in the seminar encouraged faculty to think of their
pedagogical efforts not just as the disseminating of abstract bodies of knowledge but as the
creation of situation to which student must respond.
Finally, the formation of common values and appreciation cannot be legislated or argued into
existence from the outside. It takes well-organized occasions for entering imaginatively into the
pedagogical life of others and learning to articulate their predicaments and values fairly.