Program Delivery & Support
 

Program Delivery and Support refers to actual programs that have been specifically designed to address the ideals of a liberal education. This division is central to the Institute in that our aim is to be much more than a think-tank; we want to make a concrete contribution to day-to-day practice. The emphasis here is on implementation, delivery, and support of actual programs, whether these occur in schools, or (perhaps) at the undergraduate level.

Current Initiatives (2004-05)

At present, the only site where ILE programs are put into practice is Island Pacific School (IPS) in British Columbia. While IPS addresses, in a general way, all the aims of a liberal education – (by aspiring to give middle school students an adequate “primer coat” for a liberal education) – the three most specific and concrete programs that are delivered there are the grade 6-7 Practical Reasoning courses, the grade 8-9 Senior Seminars, and the Masterworks Program:

The grade 6-7 Practical Reasoning Course is an introduction to the art and science of constructive argument. Topics include “the obstacles & guarantors of critical discourse”, “distinguishing types of claims”, “understanding argument forms (i.e. deductive & inductive reasoning)”, “moral reasoning”, and “basic fallacies”.

The grade 8 Senior Seminar Course currently applies some of what was learned in grade 6-7 to a sustained analysis of the concept of the “Just War”. The grade 9 Senior Seminar course usually includes an introduction to Western philosophy (via a close reading of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World), and in introduction to Ethics. The seminar format, in both cases, is meant to inculcate a sense of intellectual responsibility and camaraderie in students.

The grade 9 Masterworks program is a graduation requirement that asks students to select a topic of personal interest, research the topic, write a 12-40 page paper on it, and then present the paper to a public audience in June. Masterworks students are supported by an advisory committee of one faculty member and 2-3 external advisors that meet monthly to monitor progress and make suggestions.

Click here for more information on the Masterworks Program.

Island Pacific School also attempts to “invite students into the moral narrative” that is their lives by way of its general school culture of respect and responsibility, and in particular, by the responsibilities it has built into its House Program and Mentor Program. All of these initiatives, however, are currently under review.

For the current term (2004-05) the aim of the Institute is to continue to support the delivery and improvement of these courses and programs at Island Pacific School, with a view to consider how they might be transported to other educational settings.

Future plans in the area of Program Delivery & Support include the following:

• to create a program support & evaluation model to properly assist any school, college, or university that adopts an ILE program

• to recruit schools that would like to adopt specific ILE programs, (e.g. Practical Reasoning, Senior Seminars, Masterworks)

• to create a schools development template for groups that may want to establish an ILE school of their own

• to create an accreditation protocol for schools (new or existing) that may want to become ILE schools

• to create a schools support & evaluation model to properly assist ILE schools

• to recruit schools that would like to become “ILE” school