Welcome to the Gaede Institute!
Welcome to the Gaede Institute’s website. Here you’ll find information on our programs for strengthening liberal arts education and for providing liberal arts learning opportunities to the many communities Westmont intersects with beyond the academy. With the growing complexity of real world problems there is an ever greater need for people who bring a range of perspectives to social issues, and who recognize that their education is connected to the whole of their lives: their community involvement, their political engagement, their spiritual development, as well as their profession. We hope you’ll find the resources of the Gaede Institute helpful as together we seek to learn and teach for a complex world.
- Chris Hoeckley, Director
The Liberal Education of Students of Faith
The Ninth Annual Conversation on the Liberal Arts
February 26-27, 2010 • Santa Barbara, California
All of us—whether at secular or faith-based institutions—have students in our classrooms with spiritual and religious commitments and identities that interact powerfully with their learning. And so it should be. Liberal education educates the whole person, and for these students wholeness means navigating the relationship between their spiritual lives and their education.
But liberally educating students of faith raises difficult questions… (read more)
*** Register Today ***
Learning in a Time of Politics:
Liberal Arts Education and Political Engagement
The Eighth Annual Conversation on the Liberal Arts
February 15 - 16, 2008 • Santa Barbara, California
How do we reach one of the crucial goals of liberal arts education -- to help students become critical, informed, and engaged participants in our shared political life -- in a climate that favors sound bites over analysis, and debates over deliberation?
Faculty and academic administrators from across the country recently met to consider these questions. Pulling from her extensive work in higher education and political formation, Julie Reuben, Harvard historian of education, provided the catalyst for our conversation.
***Read the Papers from the Conversation here.***
***Listen to the Conversation here. ***
***Continue the Conversation here.***