By Lawrence Drew Hultgren

The Mexican artist Orozco has put into a fresco at Dartmouth College a disturbing artistic vision of a world characterized by a bifurcation of education which separates "the classroom" and "the real world", theory and practice, insight and application. In Orozco's painting, skeleton mothers are being attended to by physicians in academic garb who are themselves skeletons. Skeleton babies are being delivered and dressed in black gown and mortar board and placed carefully on a shelf. Beyond may be seen a world in flames.

As an educator, I have long been haunted by Orozco's images of skeleton scholars acting as midwives to skeleton babies which are fit only for a shelf of irrelevance in a burning world. In one sense, the contemporary frescoes of Orozco (re)turn me to the dusty paths of 5th B.C.E. Athens and the warnings of a different kind of "midwife", Socrates—but that's another story.

How am I currently responding to Orozco's challenges to connect thought and action, to integrate knowledge and know-how, to link learning to life? I have joined some wonderful colleagues—even students, parents, and community partners—to develop a pilot project called PORTfolio. PORTfolio is designed to intensify the liberal arts experience of our students and stretch it in new directions.

The PORTfolio Project responds to students' needs in today's world of rapid change. It advances their learning by connecting academic work with experience in the world, providing students with opportunities to test their values and beliefs, explore career paths, and adapt to new and changing surroundings. In addition to specially designed interdisciplinary seminars, PORTfolio students have new options for developmental experiences away from campus: shadowing experiences, externships, internships, and study-abroad. Moreover, students construct electronic portfolios that initiate and later document their integrated learning experiences. Our commitment is to engage students to do things that matter to their own development, to make life connections. Our goal is to help students discover the liberal arts as woven into the fabric of their daily lives.

At Virginia Wesleyan, we have always believed that the best preparation for life, especially for citizenship, careers and professions, is a liberal arts education. Most colleges wait until the senior year to discuss life after (or even during!) college. Rather than completing the overall college experience with these concerns, PORTfolio uses these concerns to help launch a student's undergraduate career. We assist students to become more reflective about themselves and the world of work, graduate or professional school. In other words, we proceed Socratically. We include the encounter with the world outside of the classroom as part of the examined life.

Rather than divide an undergraduate education into separate, fragmentary experiences of "the real world" and "the classroom", the PORTfolio Project brings them together, ideally establishing a symbiotic relationship. It provides an education for the whole of life. We wish to regain that sense of wholeness or coherence that lies at the heart of a liberal arts education.

In developing the PORTfolio Project, we have been mindful that our students will be spending their future in the next Millennium. Our responsibility is to help them receive the best learning possible—a liberal arts education that connects the classroom with the world. A liberally educated person shall not be someone prepared to do just one thing but rather someone able to learn whatever the situation might require. In one sense, we are replacing the old adage of "earning a living" with a new one—"learning a living." If we don't, we fear, we will be preparing our students for what the past thought important rather than for what the future will need.

A short thirty years ago, my wife and I began our teaching careers at Virginia Wesleyan. One of the promises of this then new college that attracted us was its 'once and future' commitment to a quality liberal arts education that goes far beyond the walls of a classroom, an undergraduate experience that brings the liberal arts to life for our students. (The 1969 Catalog touted the College as "only a few minutes away from a living laboratory", and it invited students to practice their education in "[t]he Norfolk-Virginia Beach metropolitan area...one of the rapidly growing urban centers on the Atlantic coast.")

It has been—is—exciting to join with colleagues to develop the PORTfolio Project. And it is most rewarding to see parents, alumni, alumnae, trustees and other community leaders embrace the project. PORTfolio, as part of the College's innovative initiative 'Knowledge and Know-How', will help students see that the liberal arts are both enriching in terms of personal development and enabling in terms of future careers.