General education is at the forefront of the challenges facing faculty and administrators as they develop initiatives to address the nationwide trend focused on college completion programs. Attempts to trim core requirements and shift courses to online environments could be one answer for providing greater course access, for improving enrollments,…

Traditional approaches to civic engagement have been marginalized and have had little impact on the core curriculum. "Critical civic literacy" is an alternative curricular approach to civic engagement that explicitly moves departments, disciplines, and degree programs to examine issues of social responsibility and social justice from the…

The University of California-Merced's Core 1 has potential to foster genuine interdisciplinary thinking by asking students to conceptualize knowledge across fields of inquiry. Core 1 introduces students to the range of scholarly inquiry at the university all in the span of one semester-long, writing-intensive, integrated curriculum that…

Human social evolution depends in part on using language persuasively to secure cooperation. Rhetoric emerged in the West over two thousand years ago as a deliberate cultural construction. Though often misunderstood today, rhetoric is fundamental in general education programs that teach students how knowledge is forged in agreement and applied.…

This essay argues for the importance of quantitative reasoning skills as part of a liberal education and describes the successful introduction of a mathematics-based quantitative skills course at a small Canadian university. Today's students need quantitative problem-solving skills, to function as adults, professionals, consumers, and citizens in…

Many universities positively impact student retention rates by aligning state competencies and undergraduate coursework with specific learning outcomes known to contribute to success. Faculty from teaching and nursing conducted interdisciplinary focus group research to gather student perceptions concerning whether skills obtained through core…

Seton Hall University's new core curriculum includes a pair of Signature Courses and a third-year Signature Course developed within departments, two composition classes, a university life course, and five proficiencies. This article describes the process leading to the development of this new curriculum and provides advice on general education…

The debate over the best delivery of general education, whether through a canon of Great Books, a core curriculum of specific courses and course sequences, or a distribution requirement of course types providing for greater student choice, has existed for generations. Today, the debate plays out in practice across the top-rated colleges and…

After describing our interdisciplinary humanities course and its history, we identify challenges these courses face and strategies for keeping them vigorous. We argue that course longevity depends on effective translation of vision and content into explicit goals bridging the gaps between faculty members and between faculty and students. (Contains…

This article examines a six-year process of reforming the core curriculum at a midsize public research university, showing how a seminar for first-year students, a lengthy campus-wide dialogue, and a multidisciplinary community of faculty produced a new core curriculum focused on inquiry, communication, and undergraduate research. (Contains 1…

When faculty members think about curriculum, they think about course content. Debates about general education reflect this focus. Drawing on a case study, this article considers, rather, the politics and process of curricular change. It argues that success in this realm depends on the skill of academic administrators. (Contains 2 figures.)

The purpose of this study of two undergraduate liberal arts core curricula was to answer the following questions: What was the impact on student humanitarian values of a traditional distribution general education core curriculum with a supplementary integrated intervention strategy that requires students to examine personal values and the values…

This essay asks and answers ten questions that the author believes can serve as a primer or heuristic for educators who are considering character education as a meaningful part of their pedagogical objectives in both the university core curriculum and specific disciplines. All of the questions and answers are premised around the key assertion that…

This article argues that core curriculum history surveys should promote critical reading and thinking skills, a basic knowledge of history, and a sense of self-awareness. Self-awareness is suggested as an alternative to attempts to promote student civic character by such means as service education. It also outlines the interconnection of teaching…

Extensive assessment of innovative core courses pointed to five features of the courses that led to students being actively engaged in learning. Faculty teaching the courses created an environment to foster collaborative learning, facilitated student ownership of learning, structured their courses to connect academic ideas with other disciplines…