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Curriculum by Design: Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core

Online ISBN:
9781531503963
Print ISBN:
9781531501327
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Curriculum by Design: Innovation and the Liberal Arts Core

Mary Thomas Crane (ed.),
Mary Thomas Crane
(ed.)
Boston College
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David Quigley (ed.),
David Quigley
(ed.)
Boston College
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Andy Boynton (ed.)
Andy Boynton
(ed.)
Boston College
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Published online:
21 September 2023
Published in print:
16 May 2023
Online ISBN:
9781531503963
Print ISBN:
9781531501327
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

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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