Rationale -- Coherence: a Guide to a Reading of This Proposal
CLA Document
The individual elements of this proposal for a program of common learning share certain features, but individually address different needs. Try to place yourself in the position of students just entering college who are trying to make sense out of their education, and follow them along in their college experience.
The Foundation Seminars for first-year students aim not only to address in a very basic way at the initial stages of a student's college experience the kinds of needs the faculty has identified, by developing particular skills and presenting the attitudes toward learning we expect. They also build strengths in students and thereby the whole curriculum by introducing students to some essential common features of the curriculum. The seminars embody the six Common Learning Objectives as well as introduce other elements of common learning not specified in those learning objectives. They begin to create the sense of a learning community.
The distribution requirement, including Disciplinary Breadth and Broadened Perspectives for the 21st Century, builds upon the foundations laid in the first-year seminar, and creates its own foundations for the interdisciplinary intellectual work to which students will increasingly be introduced and in which they will engage as life-long learners. The requirement provides a means for conscious engagement with the intellectual products of our cultural legacies. At the same time, it offers tools for the analysis and judgment of competing hypotheses and conceptual frameworks of knowledge. It broadens the horizons of learning for all students, whatever their degree program or major, and makes possible the mature intellectual discussions that students will need to have both inside and outside their major as they become independent learners.
The majors offered in the College provide students with disciplinary depth, another quality that should characterize every student's education. In addition, the major itself can meet many of the other goals of our Common Learning Agenda. As noted in The Challenge of Connecting Learning, the Association of American Colleges' recent study of liberal learning and the major:
The properly structured major enables students to develop an increased capacity to understand and employ a range of topics and analytic tools, as well as characteristic questions and arguments specific to a domain of inquiry....To fulfill its role in liberal learning, the major also must structure conversations with the other cultures represented in the academy...
The Capstone Experience provides the formal opportunity for integration and coherence that currently is lacking in many students' courses of study. Investigation of a topic of interest and of concern to themselves and to others, either in a regular course or one of the alternative forms, will develop a different kind of intellectual maturity. Students will have time to reflect on and examine their commitment to theoretical perspectives implicit in their courses of study. The Capstone Experience could provide a context for students to address dimensions of the questions they study that reach into the areas of values or professional ethics. Whether students plan to enter a career directly or to go on to advanced educational opportunities, this Capstone Experience will be a pause to take stock, to consider the kind of life that lies ahead.
We invite you to consider these elements as a series of components that build on one another as you read our recommendations and their explication in the documents that follow.
