Blending liberal arts & business education

Liberal Education, Wntr, 2004 by E. Byron Chew, Cecilia McInnis-Bowers

Building a bridge to connect the two domains assumes a separation that must be crossed by students. The result is a common attitude among professional students that liberal arts, or general education, classes are to be quickly checked off a list of graduation requirements. Implied is that graduation requirements of English, foreign language, history, psychology, mathematics, et al., are "filler" until students can begin the relevant courses in the business major; in other words, students hurry to get across the bridge to the other side of the river, the "useful side." In actuality, bridging has served to further validate the separation between the liberal arts and business, particularly in the mind of the student. This "river of separation" between the domains must, from the student's perspective, reinforce the perception that liberal arts courses lack relevance to the "real world" or to future career pursuits.

Beyond bridges

This disconnected curricular structure challenges educators with the task of enabling students to grasp the interconnections in their business education between concepts and skills from a rich array of liberal arts. Students do not perceive a cohesive learning experience, and the curricular disconnect between the domains could be partly responsible. Educators have expressed concerns about the apparent inability of students to make connections, even within one program of study; certainly these concerns multiply as students are challenged to make connections between unrelated--disconnected--programs of study:

  The fragmentation of the curriculum into a collection of independently
  "owned" courses is itself an impediment to student accomplishment,
  because the different courses students take ... are not expected to
  engage or build on one another. Few maps exist to help students plan
  or integrate their learning as they move in and out of separately
  organized courses, programs, and campuses. In the absence of shared
  learning goals and clear expectations, a college degree more
  frequently certifies completion of disconnected fragments than of a
  coherent plan for student accomplishment (AAC & U 2003).

Enabling students to make connections is a challenge not only in general education, but in business programs as well. In fact, the need to ensure that business students make meaningful connections across the functional disciplines in business (marketing, management, finance, etc.) is so recognized that the professional accreditation organizations encourage integrating or summative experiences for students, thus enabling them, in structured settings, to bring together the learning outcomes within the functional areas of business (Gordon and Howell 1959, AACSB 2003).

Integrating functional knowledge from within a business curriculum is important, but it does not explicitly address integrating the learning outcomes from the liberal arts into the major. The summative experience that is needed is one that integrates learning outcomes from the two domains (Chew, McInnis-Bowers, et al. 1996). Furthermore,