Synopsis
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 and 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 also includes 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 they have encountered when trying to create structures to make curriculum change sustainable over time and to foster ongoing innovation.
About the Authors
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 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 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.
Allison Adair is associate professor of the practice in the English Department at Boston College and specializes in creative writing, with a focus on poetry and flash fiction and a special interest in digital humanities. She is the author of poems published in many venues, including North American Review, Southwest Review, American Poetry Review, Pushcart Prize XLIII, and of prose in Grub Daily. She taught the Enduring Question course “Truth-telling in Literature.”
Lynne Anderson is the director of English Language Learning at Boston College. Trained in applied linguistics, she teaches writing, literature, and oral language production courses. She is the author of Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens. She is interested in the intersections among language, culture, identity, and food. She teaches narrative nonfiction writing workshops on the topic of food and culture, including a course abroad in Paris each spring for BC’s Office of International Programs. She taught the Enduring Question course titled “Roots and Routes: Writing Identity, Migration, and Culture.”
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