Two recent articles, "They go to Bjorklunden and are changed" and "Digging Bjorklunden: When is a field trip more than a field trip?" illustrate the success of an innovative approach to enhancing liberal education.
Each weekend during the academic year, groups of Lawrence University students and faculty travel to Bjorklunden Vid Sjon ("Birch Forest by the Water"), a 425-acre estate on the Lake Michigan shore just south of Baileys Harbor in picturesque Door County, Wisconsin, for a distinctive and highly memorable integrative learning experience.
A place of great beauty and serenity, Bjorklunden is the location for weekend seminars and retreats that offer a unique opportunity to explore and reflect upon ideas, artistic expressions, and community issues. Seminar topics are wide ranging and students have the opportunity for intensive inquiry and discussion with faculty members and among themselves in an informal, intimate setting. As a place of refuge and peace, where spiritual values and aesthetic sensibilities can be explored, the weekend experience at Bjorklunden provides a unique setting for personal growth, embracing the liberal education ideal of connecting thought and reflection.
In creating and developing the seminars at Bjorklunden, Lawrence University seeks to provide a different kind of educational experience, one in which participants are encouraged to leave old assumptions behind and the barriers of class, rank, and status are removed in order for students and faculty to learn meaningfully from each other. As President Richard Warch has observed, a fundamental purpose of the Bjorklunden weekends is "to confront ourselves and others on a personal scale, one that is and will be in sharp contrast to the anonymity of mass culture."
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