FAHE is pleased to announce the latest edition of Quaker Higher Education. This issue of QHE features articles that attempt to take a step back and think about why we teach, how we teach, and what our teaching is meant to do for our students. All the essays in this issue grew out of presentations at the June 2013 conference of the Friends Association for Higher Education at Malone University.
Jay Case (Malone University) opens this issue, as he did the conference, with an appeal to consider our students as both thinking and desiring beings, with perhaps the thinking part being less important than we would like to think. He charts a way forward through the demands and expectations of our materialistic and utilitarian society by contextualizing our educational work within the Quaker spiritual and intellectual traditions.
Tracey Hucks (Haverford College) challenges us to embrace the challenges of diversity in deed as well as word, and move our education out of the classroom into the whole lives of our students and ourselves. Laura Foote (Malone University) informs us of the challenges facing women who speak out in the public sphere, throughout history down to today, and shows how three Quaker women, in particular, have dealt with those challenges, risen above their detractors, and inspired others to speak up and speak out.
Finally, Steve Chase (Antioch University New England) uses the example of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to inspire us to be creatively maladjusted to the injustices of the world. He shows us through example how education can weave together knowledge, caring, and activism.
All these stories show us ways to break down the artificial barriers that attempt to compartmentalize and (intentionally or not) trivialize what we teach and what we learn. Holistic learning extends through history, through the classroom, out to the community, and into action.
Friends Association for Higher Education 