After more than 200 faculty meetings over a year of campus discussion, a faculty committee presented Thursday an outline for revising the undergraduate curriculum in a way that asserts the value of a liberal arts education, simplifies graduation requirements and promotes student ownership of their educational experience.
One building block of the idea is a multidisciplinary team-taught university course called The Duke Experience, which would allow all first-year students to begin their Duke educations with a common educational experience.
Suzanne Shanahan, co-director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and chair of the curriculum review committee, presented the proposal to the Arts and Sciences Council as the first step toward getting faculty feedback and filling in the details behind the concepts in the plan.
Further faculty meetings will be held this semester, and a final proposal should be ready for faculty approval in the fall, Shanahan said.
“We wanted the curriculum to be simple, scholarly and give students opportunities to create their own educational pathways,” Shanahan said in an interview earlier this week. “We want the curriculum to be a signature for Duke. It’s a fundamental feature of the undergraduate experience. In our talks with faculty and students, we saw a campus that was innovative and students who are looking for opportunities to explore new passions and interests. The question was how to highlight this and interpret them in a curriculum.”
The new proposal would replace Curriculum 2000, developed nearly two decades ago. Built around a matrix of requirements across skill development and methods of learning, Curriculum 2000 helped promote classroom innovation. But after two decades, two-thirds of the faculty has changed, and the original logic behind the curriculum isn’t well understood, Shanahan said. There are also concerns the innovations the curriculum promoted no longer easily fit into its matrix.
As proposed, the new curriculum will include four requirements:
The Duke Experience: All first-year students will take one common 10-month flipped-taught course, led by five faculty members across different fields and beginning in the summer prior to students’ official enrollment. The course topic – some possibilities are Mind and Body, Climate Change, Race and Inequality -- will rotate every three to five years.
“This responds to something important we regularly heard in discussions,” Shanahan said. “How can students have a common scholarly experience, and how do they get exposure to all aspects of a Duke education? We think with this course, students will engage in a common topic, receive a great introduction into the best Duke offers and learn to argue and write across disciplines.”
Major and Depth in a Different Field: While interdisciplinary study is a signature of a Duke education, Shanahan said the disciplines remain the foundation of scholarly study. All students will be required to have a major, but in addition, they will have to show depth of study in a different field, either through a double major, a certificate, a minor or a self-designed sequence.
“It’s well known that 83 percent of Duke students currently conduct work in a second field,” Shanahan said. “We want that to be 100 percent.”
Mentored Scholarly Experience: Under the proposal, all students will end their Duke education with some kind of educational exploration. This will be broadly defined, so it can be a mentored lab experience, honors thesis, arts or writing project, independent research, internship or some other guided intellectual work.
Thursday’s presentation was intended to outline a plan for further discussion, and many details remain unfinished.
At the council meeting, faculty expressed strong preliminary support, but there were significant points of concern about the details yet to come: How would the curriculum affect the current writing, science and foreign language requirements? What kind of experiences will qualify for a mentored scholarly experience or as a second field of study? How will The Duke Experience affect FOCUS and other first-year educational experiences?
Several faculty focused on the impact on the Thompson Writing Program, which oversees the required first-year writing class and advance-level writing courses.
Jennifer Ahern-Dodson, a Thompson faculty member, said program faculty believe “there is no way you can fold the first-year writing course into The Duke Experience” and that the curriculum “also minimizes upper-level writing immersion courses” that are important in training students to write capstone scholarly papers.
Shanahan said the curriculum committee had talked about all of these issues and would spend the semester in further discussion with faculty members. “It’s important that people understand that right now this is just a concept, and that it is a concept that be refined.”
Some hints of how the details might play out can be found in the five expectations that Shanahan also presented to the council. She said these are the skills and ways of knowing that students should have when they graduate with a Duke education.
- Communicate Compellingly
- Understand Other Languages, Cultures and Civilizations, Past and Present
- Understand Different Forms of Scientific Thought and Evidence
- Understand Creative Products of the Human Imagination
- Evaluate, Manage and Interpret Information
“Our hope is that students would combine these nine elements to create a coherent intellectual experience,” Shanahan said.
The discussion explored the place of the curriculum within the university more broadly. The advising system, long an issue of concern for faculty, students and administration, is being reviewed as well. The two issues are deeply connected, said Steve Nowicki, dean of undergraduate education, since advisers are essential for guiding students through the curriculum.
Shanahan, in fact, said the new curriculum was envisioned with this rethinking of the advising system in mind, adding more faculty and professionals who could turn the curriculum from a checklist of graduation requirements into a real educational journey.
“There is a need to fundamentally change advising even if we don’t change curriculum,” Nowicki said. “And there is a move afoot. I suspect the endgame will require more resources, include a cadre of Ph.D. advisers working in concert with faculty to help students.”