Abstract: Business students tend overwhelmingly to be instrumental consumers of education (Colby et al 2011). This means they generally want each facet of their education to create value in terms of future career success. On the other hand, liberal learning takes a broader view that education is aimed at developing the whole person. focus is on the terminal value of the educated citizen in addition to the instrumental value of career success. It has often been the case that some students, seemingly motivated only by utilitarian concerns, simply never consider or abandon the hope of finding meaning and purpose that is truly satisfying. They need initiation into critical thought, in part so that they may reflect upon the careerism to which they have become subject, writes Sharon Daloz Parks (2000, 164). Given such an environment, how does a liberal approach to education fit and make sense? This dichotomy between what business students want and what educators seek to provide is the challenge of business education at liberal arts colleges. USING COMPLEX WRITING ASSIGNMENTS TO DEVELOP LIBERAL LEARNERS Evidence from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (2011) indicates employers are seeking college graduates with the essential skills of critical and analytical reasoning, ethical decision making, complex problem solving, and oral and written communication. This evidence suggests that liberal learning should be embedded in business education to provide greater breadth. However, Colby, Ehrlich, Sullivan, and Dolle (2011) argue that undergraduate business curricula are primarily effective at teaching applied writing skills needed for memos and reports. How can business educators use more complex forms of writing assignments to develop liberal learners? As an alternate approach to applied writing, writing for inquiry has been proposed as a viable solution for helping business students develop the essential skills needed in the modern economy (Colby et al 2011). The task of writing as inquiry, therefore, begins with the careful identification of a productive question, proceeds through research and investigation to construct a satisfying answer, formulates claims based on these explorations and constructs arguments to elaborate and support these claims, insights and judgments, (Colby et al 2011,104). underlying assumption of this pedagogy is that you can create knowledge through writing. At a small Midwestern liberal arts college with a large business program, the tensions between the practical focus of students and the desire for liberal learning principles arose in a senior capstone course. This led to the forming of a faculty partnership between the authors - a business professor and a librarian - to more fully address liberal learning in the course through a writing-forinquiry-based project. librarian suggested adding reflective journaling about the process of completing the project with the original aim of assessing information literacy, but the unintended outcome was even more valuable. examination of results from the combined assignment of a capstone analytic paper with a linked reflective journal provides evidence that students were able to fully engage in the writing-for-inquiry process and address multiple facets of liberal learning. To help students understand the entirety of the writing-forinquiry process, the project was designed with a series of staged assignments culminating in the production and submission of a final five-thousand-word analytic research paper. At each of the stages, students received feedback on their work. Carol Collier Kuhlthau's (2004) information search process model examines the student research experience through considerations of the thoughts, feelings, and actions required by a robust research task. business professor and librarian used Kuhlthau's model to set expectations with students and to openly discuss the need for intervention in research. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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