Core courses introduced

By Lauren Busto

The university introduced a pilot program for some courses to be included in the new core curriculum, which should be fully implemented for the class of 2013.

The new core is a step away from the current core's promotion of a checklist mentality, said Phyllis Brown, core curriculum director.

Brown added that the goal is for students to find a more integrated curriculum.

"For students to go out into the world and become real leaders, they have to see connections," said Brown.

English professor Sherry Booth and history professor Naomi Andrews both said that the new core is ambitious.

"It depends on small class sizes for the maximum benefit for students. So that is one place where the potential for it to fall short exists: if the class sizes grow over time," Andrews said in an e-mail. "We need to have the resources to make it work."

Kelly O'Donnell is a community facilitator on Swig's ninth floor, where all the students in Booth's Cultures and Ideas pilot class live. She is also a peer educator in the class.

O'Donnell said the class has bonded very quickly because the students all live together.

One of the themes throughout the class is wolves, said O'Donnell, "The floor has already started to refer to themselves as the wolf pack."

Although O'Donnell had a good experience in her Western Civilization classes, they were very focused on the past, she said.

The class now is much more integrated and focuses more on applying what the students are learning to life outside of the classroom, she said.

Santa Clara last updated its core in the early 1990s.

Thus, much of the motivation for change came from an acknowledgement of changing times and new scholarship, said Diane Jonte-Pace, director of new core implementation.

The school's re-accreditation this year is also a contributing factor.

The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) asks schools to reassess what they want their students to learn and how they are going to teach them these things, said Jonte-Pace.

In response, the committee developed learning goals. Instead of working these goals into the old core, a new core was created instead.

The three learning goals that are woven throughout the new classes are knowledge, habits of mind and heart and engagement with the world.

With these goals, the core aims to promote integrative and intentional learning, said Jonte-Pace.

"We want to be more clear about how students' education is contributing to a sense of the world and its needs," said Jonte-Pace.

Classes are broken up into sections, much like the current requirements of orientations, foundations and explorations.

Some of the biggest changes come with the new western culture and pathway requirements.

The cultures and ideas sequence consists of two linked classes that will focus on both global and local experiences throughout a period of history, said Jonte-Pace.

Instead of taking one discipline and studying it separately throughout its history, the cultures and ideas classes will integrate culture and history, she said.

The pathways requirement allows students to study the same theme from many different perspectives, forcing them to draw connections and intersections, said Brown.

Students choose an issue in which they are interested, such as poverty or the environment, and take four classes associated with that topic in a variety of fields.

"Every major has a class or a topic that they feel should be required in the core, and the pathways, it appears, will allow this to happen," Booth said.

Pilot courses were offered this fall for students to take, including many cultures and ideas classes.

The incoming class in Fall, 2009 will be the first class required to fulfill this core.

Contact Lauren Busto at (408) 554-4546 or lbusto@scu.edu.