March 30, 2001
One of Arts & Sciences' most important goals is to prepare students for the challenges and opportunities they will encounter in the 21st century. Fundamental to this preparation is the Arts & Sciences curriculum, which benefited from ongoing changes but had not received a comprehensive revision for over 20 years.
To ensure that the University would continue to offer the best possible educational experience to undergraduate students, Edward S. Macias, Ph.D., executive vice chancellor and dean of Arts & Sciences, appointed a commission led by John Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, to work on reviewing the curriculum in 1997. The commission --comprised of faculty and students --reviewed the "old" program, assessed its particular strengths, and established priorities for the "new" curriculum.
Over a two-year period, the group conducted open forums with faculty to determine their preferences in revising their areas of study. A few priorities quickly surfaced.
"Faculty wanted more focus on writing skills and small courses available so students could discuss topics in a serious manner," Bowen said. "Faculty and students alike wanted elective courses to have more coherence with each other, and a chance for students to combine what they've learned in their major into an important experience in senior year."
These priorities developed into first-year seminars, clusters, writing courses and capstone experiences --the basics of the new curriculum. "Faculty also wanted students to seriously engage in study of issues of social differentiation and cultural diversity, carry out work in quantitative analysis and in intensive writing, and these activities, taken together, will prepare them to be better citizens of the world," Bowen said.
"We reached broad agreement on these goals, then put the recommendations to a vote by students and faculty," Bowen said. "It is a tribute to the process that all the commission's recommendations were approved by vote of both Arts & Sciences' Council of Students and its faculty. We then turned the project over to the implementation committee."
Joseph Loewenstein, Ph.D., professor of English in Arts & Sciences, chairs the curriculum implementation committee. Its mission is to make the Bowen commission's recommendations work --determine general goals and fashion them into guidelines for departmental planning. In October 1999, Loewenstein's group asked each department to begin that process.
"The best thing about this process is that faculty started thinking in a fresh way about undergraduate education and doing so across department lines," Loewenstein said. For the next year, the implementation committee worked with departments on their courses and requirements, until the new curriculum began to take shape.
Early in the implementation process, the committee realized that students would need to plan their course of study seriously while taking many variables into account. Working with the implementation group, a team from information systems built a Web-based curricular system from the ground up. This interactive system allows students to plan and track their progress over their college career.
"We'll ask all students to have an adviser-approved plan to satisfy their degree requirements by the end of sophomore year," Loewenstein said.
"We're giving students the tools they need to think about all four years here," Loewenstein added.
Unlike the curriculum commission, which finished its work and turned the project over to Loewenstein's group, the implementation committee will continue working. No one knows the new curriculum better than his group, Loewenstein said.
"The beauty is that we can see whether we've done it right," he said. "We can examine what's working, monitor it, and make changes if needed."
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