Liberal Education Student Conference revived after five years
20. December 2024ECOLAS supports students at the Bristol Liberal Arts Symposium
18. March 2025News in ECOLAS network 2024
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The year 2024 was quite rich regarding the developments in liberal arts education in Europe. It has seen interesting national developments. The network University Colleges in the Netherlands has been existing for many years now and continues to be a leader in liberal arts education. Next to it, there are now as many as three emerging national initiatives.
- First, in April, a gathering of liberal arts programmes’ representatives in the UK took place in Coventry at the University of Warwick and aimed at expressing common concerns within the UK and internationally. Next to the hosting institution, the other participants of this Liberal Arts+ Network included King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London, University College London, University of Birmingham, University of Bristol, University of Edinburgh, University of Manchester, University of Nottingham, University of Sussex, and the Royal Society of Arts.
- In a similar manner, the first German national gathering of liberal arts institutions was hosted by University College Freiburg (UCF) in September. The developments have been rather intense in Germany recently – out of 7 participating institutions, three are well established LA programmes (UCF, Bard College Berlin and Leuphana University Lüneburg), 4 have established a LA programme throughout the last two years (Justus Liebig University Giessen and University of Hamburg) or are about to start soon (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and University of Technology Nuremberg).
- The third national initiative comes from Ukraine whose reform of its educational system is underway despite the country is a victim in war that continues to rage. Representatives of its 20 universities met at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland in July and heard presentations from several European LA institutions. Subsequently, five Ukrainian universities (in Izmail, Kyiv, Poltava, Ternopil and Zaporizhzhia) started working to implement LA programs, assisted by 5 established European LA institutions (UC Maastricht, Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts, AMU Poznan, Artes Liberales at Warsaw University and JLU Giessen). This is a part of an EU-funded 3-year project that was initiated at a kick off meeting in Giessen in December and which includes participation of ECOLAS
ECOLAS continues its work with the university alliance project EPICUR. Our association is primarily through work package #4 led by UCF that aims to integrate LAS throughout the European university curriculum. We were able to attend the opening of the EPICUR Centre for International Teaching and Learning and Larry Boetsch was invited to give the keynote address at the 2024 EPICUR Forum at the University of Upper Alsace in Mulhouse, France.
There have also been new developments among students of liberal arts. After five years, the Liberal Education Student Conference was revived. It took place in May in Freiburg at UCF and was supported by ECOLAS. Not only were ca. 80 student participants from all over the Europe enthusiastic about the sessions but they also decided to organize LESC 2025 in Poznan. You might wish to take a look at a separate post about LESC and other student initiatives here. More information about them and other opportunities is coming soon.