III: THE INTEGRATIVE LIBERAL STUDIES PROGRAM

Issues

• Students should have exposure to the Humanities, through their historical development

• Students should experience how the disciplines investigate, understand and construct bodies of knowledge differently, through a range of concepts and methods

• Students should engage the Arts as a central feature of a true liberal studies education, and understand how they creatively synthesize widely ranging ideas, beliefs, and practices

• Students should know how individual disciplines approach those topics, problems, and issues that inform the human condition

• Offer opportunities for integration of student experience as widely as possible

• Maximize student choice, while providing for a common experience

• Offer faculty opportunities to engage in general education from their areas of interest and expertise

• Maximize faculty choice and opportunity; increase possibilities for innovation in the general education curriculum

 Program Components

• Humanities Core

• Topical Clusters

• Arts

The Humanities Core—description and purpose

• Three-course, historical core sequence in the Humanities that examines the intellectual and cultural development of Western and non-Western systems of belief and practice

• Students may also take a course in the Arts within this Core, unless they choose to fulfill the Arts requirement elsewhere in the curriculum (see below)

 The Topical Distribution—description and purpose

• A set of courses that explore a problem, issue or idea, engaging it through disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods.

• Students must complete 5 courses from two clusters, and their choices must include 2 Social Science courses, 1 Natural Science course, and 1 Arts course, unless they use another route for the Arts requirement (see below).

• Courses are arranged under broad topical rubrics; students taking them maximize their opportunities to see connections between and divergence among disciplines and how they construct knowledge about a problem, issue, or idea.

• Student experience is cross- and inter-disciplinary, within a topical group

• Faculty can develop new topical groupings, satisfying their desire to teach from their areas of professional interest and expertise

• Faculty have opportunities, if they wish, to work collaboratively with other faculty in their topical group of courses.

• Faculty can offer special topic courses for the general education program, if they can satisfy basic criteria: 
  

• To introduce students to the basic vocabulary, concepts, and methods of discipline necessary to understand the problem, issue, or idea
• No prerequisites
• Use of challenging material aimed at educated individuals interested in life-long learning

  The Arts—description and purpose

• Students will have an intellectual engagement with Art and the creative process. 
• This engagement may take several forms:

   

  • By taking traditional Arts and Ideas Program, currently undergoing revision
  • By taking a course linked to one of the 3 Humanities Core courses
  • By taking a special topics Arts course linked to a topical group
  • By taking 3 hours, in any combination, of applied art courses or workshops from an approved list in the catalog

   

• Maximizes student choice; allows them to engage Arts according their interest and need
• Maximizes faculty opportunities to participate in general education program, both in the Core and Topical programs 
• Encourages students to see linkage between Arts and either the Core or the issues under consideration in the topical groupings, thus integrating student experience