Lessons Without Classrooms
Through innovative partnerships, faculty and undergraduate students take learning outside the classroom and beyond the University.
Brewer and Wanyama:
From struggle into song
Truth and Retelling:
Whose history is it, anyway?
Taking it (Home) with You:
A snapshot of Joyce Bono's UROP projects with CLA students
Coming to their Census:
The urbanization of rural Minnesota
Sometimes, learning means shutting out the rest of the world. It means holing up in a library cubby, burrowing into a pile of books and papers, drinking too much caffeine, and losing track of time. Take a quick survey of college campuses, and you'll find that students are engaging in this sort of learning at universities around the country.
Photo by Richard G. Anderson
But besides gaining those crucial book smarts that a college degree signifies, CLA students are engaging in another kind of learning—a kind of learning you wouldn't notice if you took a stroll through Wilson Library. That’s because nestled deep within a liberal arts education—beyond Shakespeare, beyond Socrates, even—is a process of learning more like cultivating a garden than reading a book. It’s a living, breathing sort of education. It’s the process of learning through relationships.
CLA is a fertile seedbed for intellectual, creative, and civic relationships—between undergraduates and graduates, students and faculty, economists and artists, and most important, between academia and the world.
For this article, we sifted through hundreds of exciting partnerships taking place throughout the college to highlight a few that illustrate the unique multi-dimensionality of a CLA education. In the examples we selected, students are asking difficult questions, reaching beyond their comfort zones, and tackling issues that are of profound relevance to “the real world.” Read on to learn how CLA students are discovering true scholarship through this dynamic interplay between faculty, students, and community.