This book tells the story of how a team of colleagues at Boston College took an unusual approach (working with a design consultancy) to renewing their core, and in the process energized administrators, faculty, and students to view liberal arts education as an ongoing process of innovation. It aims to provide insight into what they did, why they did it, and to provide a candid account of what has worked and what has not worked. Although all institutions are different, they believe their experiences can provide guidance to others who want to change their general education curriculum or who are being asked to teach Core or general education courses in new ways.
The book will also include short essays by a number of faculty colleagues who have been teaching in BC's new innovative Core courses, providing practical advice about the challenges of trying interdisciplinary teaching, team teaching, project or problem-based learning, intentional reflection, and other new structures and pedagogies for the first time. It will also address some of the nuts and bolts issues that they have encountered when trying to create structures to make curriculum change sustainable over time and to foster ongoing innovation.
Preface: Curriculum Revision And The Foundations Of American Higher Education |
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xi | |
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PART I INNOVATION AND THE LIBERAL ARTS CORE |
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1 | (72) |
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Choreographing the Conversation: How Designers Helped Clear an Academic Logjam |
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3 | (10) |
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What Do We Know? Or, The Perils of Expertise |
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13 | (8) |
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21 | (10) |
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Ambitious Plans Meet Reality: How We Made the Renewed Core Work |
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31 | (10) |
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Slowing Down and Opening Up: Preparing Faculty to Co-design a General Education Course |
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41 | (9) |
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Core Renewal as Creative Fidelity |
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50 | (12) |
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Reflection and Core Renewal |
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62 | (7) |
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Surprised by Conversation: A Reflection on Core Renewal at Boston College |
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69 | (4) |
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PART II TEACHING THE RENEWED CORE |
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73 | (126) |
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75 | (2) |
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Teaching about a Planet in Peril |
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77 | (5) |
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Experimenting with Science and Technology in American Society |
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82 | (22) |
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Global Implications of Climate Change: Importance of Mentorship in a Core Education |
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104 | (11) |
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Enduring Question Courses: Bringing Together Divergent Disciplines |
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115 | (2) |
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How to Live in the Material World: Two Perspectives |
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117 | (6) |
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Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace |
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Aesthetic and Spiritual Exercises, in and beyond the Classroom |
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123 | (10) |
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Enduring Question Courses: Differentiating Similar Disciplines |
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133 | (2) |
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Death in Ancient Greece and Modern Russia: Reflecting on Our Reflection Sessions |
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135 | (9) |
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Spending a Semester with "A Possession for All Time": Justice and War in Thucydides |
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144 | (6) |
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Inquiring about Humans and Nature: Creativity, Planning, and Serendipity |
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150 | (7) |
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The Liberal Arts Core: Engaging with Current Events, 2016-2020 |
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157 | (2) |
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Crossings: Teaching "Roots and Routes: ReadingAVriting Identity, Migration, and Culture" |
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159 | (8) |
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The Architecture of a Black Feminist Classroom: Pedagogical Praxis in "Where #BlackLivesMatter Meets #MeToo" |
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167 | (11) |
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Regine Michelle Jean-Charles |
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Truth-Telling in History and Literature: Constructive Uncertainty |
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178 | (12) |
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190 | (9) |
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Acknowledgments |
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199 | (4) |
Appendix A The Vision Animating The Boston College Core Curriculum |
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203 | (6) |
Appendix B Boston College Core Curriculum Required Courses |
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209 | (2) |
Appendix C Complex Problem And Enduring Question Courses, 2015-2021 |
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211 | (24) |
List of Contributors |
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235 | (8) |
Index |
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243 | |
Mary Thomas Crane (Edited By) Mary Thomas Crane is the Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English and director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Boston College. She works on early modern English literature and is the author of Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton University Press, 1993), Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton University Press, 2000), and Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). She has taught the Enduring Question course "Revolutionary Media: How Reading Changes Us." David Quigley (Edited By) David Quigley is the provost and dean of faculties and a professor of history at Boston College. He was previously dean of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at BC. He is the author of Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy (2004). He has taught the Enduring Question course "Worlds of Moby-Dick: What Historical Forces Shape a Book's Greatness." Andy Boynton (Edited By) Andy Boynton is the John and Linda Powers Family Dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. He is the author of The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen and has a blog on leadership and innovation on Forbes .com.