3) The World as Text: Diverse Communities, Shared Understandings
Oct 3rd, 2008 by masonqep
Abstract
This QEP replaces the current Global Understanding requirement of General Education with courses at two levels: new first-year courses, across many disciplines, built around a common text or texts; and an upper-division, globally focused course in the major. Its major premises are:
- General Education touches undergraduates in every discipline; this QEP increases the relevance and importance of its global component by examining basic concepts integral to the gen ed curriculum through the lens of the shared understandings and differences of perspective of our heterogeneous university community.
- The first-year common text courses will center on a literary work, a film, a piece of music, a scientific treatise, or a work of visual art and will use that text to explore a specific academic discipline in the context of at least two human cultures.
- The upper-level courses will integrate global perspectives into a required course in the major, thus producing a contextually grounded and synthetic understanding of the major discipline as it interacts with today’s increasingly international and multicultural society.
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