2. UNE tries to incorporate liberal arts into their core curriculum. UNE’s four core values were “created to provide a foundation in the liberal arts, . . . and is designed to prepare students for living informed, thoughtful, and active lives in a complex and changing society.” UNE seems to believe that liberal arts will offer students a better way to strengthen their thinking. The handbook also specifically states that undergraduates “will develop foundational knowledge and critical thinking skills that are necessary for understanding and assuming their roles in natural, social, humanistic, and other environments.” It seems that UNE is putting much emphasis on traits that are directly related to liberal arts. Moreover one of the four core values that UNE claims to provide their students is directly related to Scheuer’s argument for why we need the liberal arts. The core value “directs the student’s attention both outward with a civic contribution and inward with reflection on their connection and commitment to the larger community.” This can be related to Scheuer’s idea that a true liberal arts experience should provide a student with a holistic view of citizenship. It should provide the student with traditional civic duties, like voting, jury duty etc. As well as economic citizenship which includes working and paying taxes to contribute to the community. The last form of citizenship is cultural citizenship, where you should engage with people and have fun as well.

3. These are the following six expected outcomes from completing an explorations course at UNE. I’m currently taking two explorations courses. One is a philosophy course and the other is intermediate Spanish.

1. Comprehend a particular disciplinary approach, including its assumptions, methods, and terminology
2. Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking
3. Communicate effectively in oral and written modes, and use writing as a tool of inquiry
4. Find, evaluate, and/or use information in a way that is appropriate to a particulardiscipline
5. Understand work done in their major fields within a wider intellectual and cultural context
6. Be prepared for more advanced work in the Core, thus experiencing the Core as an integrated whole through building skills and developing new ways of thinking

Outcomes #2-4 really showcase the basic liberal arts values of teaching to be well rounded instead of very skilled in a specific field. These outcomes are related to the UNE core values of being able to employ critical thinking and developing the ability to look at a problem and understand it and be able to find the solutions. Also outcome #3 is stating that taking an explorations course will help to strengthen communication skills, especially writing skills which were emphasized in the handbook. Moreover in my Spanish class we are currently learning about the history of indigenous South American civilizations, which correlates to the value of “historically grounded understanding of the diversity of societies across the globe from a variety of disciplinary perspectives across the liberal arts and sciences.”

4. I don’t think the handbook spends much time emphasizing the specific values and distinctions that a liberal arts education offers. The handbook’s values coincided with mostly all the benefits that Scheuer described for liberal arts. Nowhere in the handbook, at least that I found, did it describe the specific benefits of having these liberal arts assets, instead only stated that they are a critical part of a complete education at UNE. I think something that the handbook could actually add is an idea from Ungar stating liberal arts “promotes the idea of listening to all points of view and not relying on a single ideology, and examining all approaches to solving a problem rather than assuming that one technique or perspective has all the answers.” This would benefit their core values where the handbook states “Scientific literacy, including an understanding of scientific along with quantitative and qualitative approaches to comprehending the universe, is also central to our educational mission.”