Curriculum by Design: Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core
Curriculum by Design: Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core
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Abstract
Human-Centered Design has been the focus of much interest, and much skepticism in the academic world. In the 2012–2013 academic year, Boston College hired a Boston-based design consulting firm to facilitate a year-long renewal of our liberal arts core curriculum. We are the only university (to our knowledge) that has worked extensively with an innovation firm to apply human-centered design to curriculum revision. This collection of essays provides narrative accounts of and reflection on our experiences working with the design firm to renew our core and our successful implementation of new interdisciplinary team-taught courses that emerged from the design process. The first section of the book explains why and how we decided to work with a design firm on the notoriously difficult project of revising our general education requirements. It reveals the challenges and controversies that arose as we engaged faculty in working to renew the curriculum and then to implement new courses that required collaboration, creativity, and new pedagogical approaches. It also explains how design thinking and the resulting new courses relate to the Jesuit tradition of Boston College. The second section of the book consists of essays by faculty who have designed and taught the new interdisciplinary Complex Problem and Enduring Question courses. These essays also relate challenges and successes as faculty worked together across disciplinary and status divisions to create new courses taught in new ways.
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Front Matter
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Part I Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core
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Choreographing the Conversation: How Designers Helped Clear an Academic Logjam
William Bole
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What Do We Know? Or, The Perils of Expertise
Toby Bottorf
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Innovation
Andy Boynton
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Ambitious Plans Meet Reality: How We Made the Renewed Core Work
Mary Thomas Crane
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Slowing Down and Opening Up: Preparing Faculty to Co-design a General Education Course
Stacy Grooters
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Core Renewal as Creative Fidelity
Gregory Kalscheur, S.J.
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Reflection and Core Renewal
Jack Butler, S.J.
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Surprised by Conversation: A Reflection on Core Renewal at Boston College
Brian D. Robinette
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Choreographing the Conversation: How Designers Helped Clear an Academic Logjam
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Part II Teaching the Renewed Core
- Complex Problem Courses
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Teaching about a Planet in Peril
Prasannan Parthasarathi andJuliet B. Schor
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Experimenting with Science and Technology in American Society
Jenna Tonn
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Global Implications of Climate Change: Importance of Mentorship in a Core Education
Tara Pisani Gareau andBrian J. Gareau
- Enduring Question Courses: Bringing Together Divergent Disciplines
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How to Live in the Material World: Two Perspectives
Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace andDunwei Wang
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Aesthetic and Spiritual Exercises, in and beyond the Classroom
Daniel M. Callahan andBrian D. Robinette
- Enduring Question Courses: Differentiating Similar Disciplines
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Death in Ancient Greece and Modern Russia: Reflecting on Our Reflection Sessions
Hanne Eisenfeld andThomas Epstein
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Spending a Semester with “A Possession for All Time”: Justice and War in Thucydides
Robert C. Bartlett
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Inquiring about Humans and Nature: Creativity, Planning, and Serendipity
Holly VandeWall andMin Hyoung Song
- The Liberal Arts Core: Engaging with Current Events, 2016–2020
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Crossings: Teaching “Roots and Routes: Reading/Writing Identity, Migration, and Culture”
Lynne Anderson andElizabeth Graver
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The Architecture of a Black Feminist Classroom: Pedagogical Praxis in “Where #BlackLivesMatter Meets #MeToo”
Régine Michelle Jean-Charles
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Truth-Telling in History and Literature: Constructive Uncertainty
Allison Adair andSylvia Sellers-García
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Covid Core Lessons
Elizabeth H. Shlala
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End Matter
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