Forums & Working Groups

TEAGLE FORUMS AND WORKING GROUPS IN LIBERAL EDUCATION

The Teagle Forums and Working Groups provide opportunities for liberal arts colleges to collaborate with other institutions, or to foster collaborative work among various constituencies on their own campuses on issues of importance to liberal education. The goal of this program is to produce fresh thinking on these issues and circulate that work in print. The collaborative work encouraged by the RFPs both recall Teagle's successful Collaborative Ventures program, and forwards the Foundation's work in liberal education.

The Teagle Working Groups in Liberal Education:

• Encourage in-depth analysis of issues of high importance for liberal education.
• Expand the empirical base upon which the understanding of such issues depends.
• Develop collegial relationships and networks among participants from different institutions, including small liberal arts colleges, and/or among different constituencies on a single college campus.
• Produce work that can be disseminated, so that the results of these analyses can be integrated into the practice of higher education.

The Foundation has made two rounds of grants to Working Groups: the first, in November 2004, for collaborative projects involving colleges, universities, and other national organizations, and the second, in November 2005, for groups based on individual campuses.

The Teagle Forums in Liberal Education:

• Stimulate fresh thinking about liberal education, ultimately improving and enlivening the educational experience of undergraduate students in the liberal arts.
• Encourage exchange of ideas and build linkages between liberal arts colleges and places with the potential to help them.
• Produce a text that will deserve wide dissemination.

The Foundation has made one round of grants to Forums. Grantees will explore fresh ideas affecting liberal education through presentations by especially thoughtful and stimulating speakers, with ample opportunities for dialogue with other colleagues. A leading institution will host each forum, drawing on the resources of its neighbors, including private liberal arts colleges. The host institution has wide latitude in the choice of topic, format, and speakers but the forums are intended to be much more than an academic lecture followed by a question period, and in every case, the forum will result in a publishable text making the principal ideas and issues accessible to a wider audience.

All groups meet regularly over a period of a year to eighteen months, and at the conclusion of the grant period, each produces a White Paper on the topic it has been exploring. These will be posted on this site as they are submitted, and may also be available in print. Permission will regularly be granted to authors, however, to publish the text in any additional place they choose on whatever terms they negotiate with other publishers.