Launched in 2018, The Liberal Arts Collaborative (formerly The Arts & Sciences Collaborative) provides events and programming that give students opportunities to better understand and articulate the interplay of the liberal arts skills through meaningful outside-the-classroom projects.  These collaborations have involved employers from Murfreesboro and Nashville, faculty on-campus, expert interviews, and community partners in a variety of settings from classroom lectures, panel discussions, and campus projects.  From these, students have gained new perspectives that help with problem-solving, connected with classmates with different interests, learned different styles of communication, improvised to stay on schedule during a pandemic, and learned the importance of creative expression. 

Collaboration with other disciplines is a hallmark of the College of Liberal Arts.  Therefore, working with other colleges and campus groups, we sponsor programming that enables students to be more than problem solvers, but to become problem framers, asking the right questions to define and understand the problem. These kinds of collaborations mirror what our students encounter in the workplace -- working with those whose skills are different from their own makes their work richer and better able to serve the world they enter after college. 

For the 2023-24 school year, the College of Liberal Arts will collaborate with the Center for Health and Human Services (CHHS) and the College of Education to bring another mental health support to students: Healthy Mondays.  This initiative, funded by the MTSU Mental Health First Aid Grant, will consist of 5 group sessions, held on Mondays, and led by peer facilitators, that will guide students to identify their personal resources they can call upon when stress emerges.  Each week will focus on a way to build resources such as positive emotions, mindfulness, resilience, conflict resolution, character strengths, and healthy habits.  This program is part of a national public health initiative to stop the spread of chronic disease by offering weekly resources to help people and organizations start and sustain healthy behaviors.  The Healthy Monday Campaigns linked up with Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Syracuse Universities to ensure that the curriculum is credible and scientifically sound. Lucy Langworthy, coordinator of this initiative at MTSU, states that the goal of this partnership “is to help students develop better mental health coping skills so that they can remain calm in times of stress.  This will help them function better and make good decisions – goals we have for all our students as they move into their adult lives.” 

 

Events

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