The Interdependency of vocational and liberal aims in higher education

Abstract

Our teaching and curricula need to reflect the connected nature of the vocational and the liberal, two differing but interrelated aims in higher education.Most students see their academic lives—their liberal arts classes and the courses in their academic major—as segregated domains. In the same way that many student affairs educators seek to purposefully stitch together the seams of the curricular and cocurricular domains, so should all educators aim to help our students more purposefully bind together the falsely separated spheres of liberal education and vocational education. An example from my own teaching demonstrates how powerful it can be when we help students to connect questions of professional preparation (vocational aims) with questions of existential meaning (liberal aims).