Course Design Proposals

The Task Force is evaluating several possible course designs. This is our current proposal.

Themes:

• The course will be organized around a set of common readings addressing a fundamental question connected with the role of values in the conduct of life and how one ought to live.  The readings will include primary texts from the full range of literary, critical and cultural traditions taught at the university from antiquity to the present, and will cut across the standard disciplinary divisions of the humanities.  The common readings will be integrated, as appropriate, with the study of the performance and visual arts. 
• The course will be exploratory rather than didactic.  It will not aim to answer fundamental questions about value but to deepen students’ understanding of them and of their importance, to reveal the range and depth of the responses to them from different periods and places, to understand the historical development of thought about them, and to provide the tools to explore them independently.
• The common core readings and course design will allow flexibility for faculty teaching under the rubric of the course to require additional readings and to bring to bear their own disciplinary knowledge and areas of expertise.
• The initial course proposal will focus on the question “What is the Good Life?”

Structure:

• The course will involve three components, a faculty classroom lecture component (~200 students), and a small classroom component (20 student cap) for discussion, run by teaching assistants or fellows, and an on-line component to support the lecture and discussion components (with the anticipation of doing a variety of different kinds of things under this heading). 
• The course assignments will include (a) a significant formal writing component, which will receive written comments and be graded with respect to content, cogency, organization, style and mechanics and (b) a significant oral presentation component, to be conducted in the context of discussion sections, on which students will be graded.
• The common experience component will include, as appropriate, coordinated performance events, exhibitions, and public lectures—for example, a keynote or capstone lecture by a distinguished visiting speaker—and coordination as appropriate with other university wide pedagogical initiatives such as the common reading program.

Administration:

• The course will be overseen by a faculty steering committee with a rotating membership drawn from, and representative of, the humanities faculties at the university.