Washington — At the annual Association of American Colleges and Universities meeting here, researchers from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching presented a sneak preview on Thursday of their forthcoming book, A New Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice.

The book, due out in April, describes the foundation’s two-year effort to bridge the gap between the liberal arts and professional education by bringing together faculty members from 14 disciplines and professions, including law, engineering, and teacher education, to compare pedagogies and discuss how to better prepare undergraduates for the practical demands of a profession.

Noting lawyers’ and law students’ frequent disappointment with the practice of law, Daisy Hurst Floyd, a professor of law at Mercer University’s School of Law and one of the project’s participants, redesigned her advanced legal-ethics course with a view to forming students’ “professional identities.” The course, which had students reflect on their motivations and aspirations in becoming lawyers, took as its model that most iconic of lawyers, To Kill a Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch, who, said Ms. Floyd, emphasized the need to be “the same person at home, work, and Sunday school.” —Paula Wasley