New Journey curriculum connects liberal arts to vocational preparation

At Lipscomb, study of the liberal arts is about developing the intellectual, ethical and spiritual skills to seek truth.

By Janel Shoun-Smith | 615-966-7078  |  01/01/2025

For the past three years, as Lipscomb’s academic administration and faculty worked to overhaul the university’s general education curriculum, they kept coming back to one thing: “…the truth shall set you free,” Lipscomb University’s motto, included on its original seal by the institutions’ founders.

At Lipscomb, study of the liberal arts is about developing the intellectual, ethical and spiritual skills to seek truth. To know God, understand the world and self, and to serve others in truth, is the ultimate aim of a Christian liberal arts education.

And so it is at Lipscomb, which this fall debuts a new curriculum called Journey: Lipscomb Core, to supersede its General Education curriculum, the foundation of every undergraduate student’s learning experience in their freshman and sophomore year.

Journey has been in the works since the launch of the university’s Lipscomb Impact 360 strategic plan, which has as its No. 1 goal to provide a premier, learner-focused Christian education. Journey has been intentionally designed with course milestones to enhance consistency in learning outcomes, shared learning experiences and a strong community within the student body.

In addition, the Journey curriculum was crafted to strongly connect Lipscomb’s liberal arts instruction in the first two years of college to the vocational preparation in the second two years of college, as well as to integrate Lipscomb’s Center for Vocational Discovery, which offers spiritual and life discovery activities to unify a student’s four-year college experience.

Classic skills in demand

The term “liberal arts” within an educational curriculum dates back to classical antiquity in the West, consisting of seven areas that Plato argued were the essential skills and fields of knowledge required to produce a free, well-educated citizen: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy, music and geometry.

While today, we may talk about critical thinking a lot more than logic, problem-solving a lot more than arithmetic, communication rather than grammar, the sentiment that these skills are valuable to society, the economy and civic life has not faded away.

In fact, according to surveys of employers by Forbes and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), 95% of employers look for job candidates who can think clearly, solve problems and communicate effectively. Also, 88% of employers look for broad knowledge in the liberal arts and sciences, and 93% say these skills are more important than a candidate’s college major.

“Many of America’s most famous CEOs are big fans of the liberal arts,” said David Holmes, dean of Lipscomb’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences until recently, and a member of the Core Task Force that guided faculty in the development of Journey. “Steve Jobs and Mark Cuban, just to name a couple. The general sentiment is that companies can teach people how to do the data, but they need philosophers to understand the why of the data.”

To put it more practically, business skills will get a graduate a great job, but skills learned in the humanities will propel a graduate into the CEO’s chair, said Howard Miller, professor of history and also a member of the Core Task Force.

“To learn critical thinking, you have to exercise your thinking muscles,” Miller said. “While poetry itself may not be crucial to living out a career in business, the task of learning to analyze poetry by gathering information and assessing and presenting that information exercises the same brain skills that a professional may use to analyze financial options, to develop a business strategy or make decisions for their own life.

“The topic is inconsequential. It exercises the thinking skills,” he said. “As you write that paper, you are forced to address the materials in front of you, think about it deeply and communicate it in a different way… We have forced you to engage, to make a decision and express that decision in an effective way.”

In addition, conducting these exercises using culturally significant works, provides future professionals with the added benefit of familiarity with cultural references in society, which can become important as they move up the career ladder, said Miller.

Journey implements a stronger focus on the liberal arts by requiring one history course, not required previously, as well as one English course and one elective chosen from politics or philosophy. Specific core texts in literature and philosophy have been chosen to use throughout general education class sections, guided by a compendium of “Great Ideas” compiled by Lipscomb’s own Richard Goode, professor of history, and Caleb Clanton, distinguished university chair in philosophy and humanities. Twenty courses have been designated as diverse perspectives courses and class-wide research projects, called CURES, are encouraged as early as freshman year.

POWER to communicate

Communication was one area of the liberal arts that emerged as a key concern of Lipscomb’s faculty during the development of Journey. Because of the great interest in enhancing communication instruction, a new two-course series called POWERS was developed.

In the same spirit of applying classical liberal arts essential skills to today’s working environment, the POWERS courses are designed to prepare students to become confident and effective communicators by applying classical concepts of rhetoric across 2025’s multiple communication platforms: speaking, writing and digital.
The Writing to Discover and Communicating to Influence courses are designed to reinforce to students that good communication skills should not be siloed from one situation to another.

The idea is to build on the communication strengths the students already possess and show them how those same skills can be used to make an academic argument, to write a professional proposal or to use social media in a civically responsible way, said Brandi Kellett, chair of the English department, associate chair for general education.

“Today students think, ‘what I do on Snapchat has nothing to do with connecting with other people across lines of difference. That's just Snapchat.’ But they will learn that Snapchat communication is actually a rhetorical act, and you're being a responsible citizen in the way you use your ideas to communicate with others, and that matters, especially in a Christian context,” she said.

Over the course of two concurrent courses, students develop writing and communication skills through both classical and digital approaches, are required to transform one idea across three different communication modalities and have the opportunity to participate in extracurricular events such as contests, symposiums and publications, said Kellett.

Foundation for the future

From the very beginning of the curriculum development process, there was always a focus on providing classical liberal arts skills in a way that made them applicable to today’s employers’ needs and demands, said Lipscomb Provost Jennifer Shewmaker.  

“We continually asked, ‘What are the foundational skills on which we can build career knowledge and skills?’” she said.

And the answers—critical and creative thinking, ethical reasoning, effective communication, teamwork and problem-solving—proved to be the same whether gleaned from Lipscomb faculty, the best research on higher education high-impact practices or Plato.

“Together, these outcomes provide a strong foundation for students to flourish not only intellectually, but ethically and vocationally no matter what career they go into," said Shewmaker.