Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The study of foreign languages (FL) and their related cultural systems has been compartmentalized into the disciplines that have traditionally been called the Liberal Arts and further subdivided, putting FL education into the subset of Humanities. Many foreign-language academic units currently find themselves fighting to recruit more students, and often face financial and curricular cuts, as students are attracted to non-liberal-arts oriented studies with the prospect of better opportunities post-graduation. It is the opinion of this researcher that this compartmentalization has stagnated the field of FL learning and inhibited its appeal to effectively interact with and inform its sister disciplines in the academy, for the benefit of all. This paper argues that FL education should look beyond its liberal arts/humanities enclave and examine the possibilities for collaboration with other academic units on the campuses of higher education. This paper will discuss the possibilities and consequences of such collaboration for students, for foreign language departments and schools, and for professional education in the U.S. as a whole, using models developed in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech (GT) as examples. The models we are developing at GT reflect our unique situation as liberal arts programs at an intensively-focused-engineering-and-sciences-Research-I institution and could be helpful for other humanities-oriented programs. The Liberal Arts and the STEM disciplines will both benefit from these types of collaborations, but more importantly, institutions will be providing the education that current and future students will need for their professional success in the 21st century.