UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

Core Matters

During the 2017-2018 academic year, UP began a process to revitalize its liberal arts core curriculum. That process has re-energized discussions about what we really teach in the core, what characterizes a UP core experience, and what it means for UP to be a comprehensive university with a strong liberal arts core.

This 'core matters' blog project is one small effort to further inform those discussions and to provide a resource to anyone interested in the UP core curriculum including those directly involved in the core revitalization. The hope is to progressively build a compendium of brief essays from faculty in various departments addressing the basic question: How does your core course, or how do your department’s core courses, serve UP’s liberal arts core curriculum, and a broader vision of a liberal education?

A premise is that the liberal arts have historically been distinguished (from other disciplinary endeavors such as the ‘mechanical arts’ or the ‘practical arts’) by an emphasis on the intrinsic value of knowledge and developing broad intellectual capacities such as reason, judgment, aesthetics, and analytical thinking. In his book Why Choose the Liberal Arts? Mark William Roche, former dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, argues that there are three broad ways the liberal arts matter: 1) for its intrinsic value and opportunities for “asking the great questions that give meaning to life”; 2) for cultivating intellectual virtues that are critical to success in any career path or civic engagement; and 3) for contributing to character formation and “the connection to a higher purpose.”

As posts are added hyperlinks will be inserted here in this preliminary table of contents (presented in the order of their appearance in Degree Works!)

  • Fine Arts
  • History
  • Literature
  • Math
  • Philosophy & Ethics
  • Science: Environmental Science, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics
  • Social Sciences: Communications, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, Social Work
  • Theology & Biblical Tradition

Plus bonus perspectives from:

  • International Languages and Cultures
  • Business
  • Education
  • Engineering
  • Nursing

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Core Matters: Thinking through Literature in English 112

This essay is the second in a series of short pieces that offer faculty across the campus an insider’s tour of one of the courses that make up UP’s Core program. Since the Core involves almost a third of the curriculum for every UP student, faculty can benefit from these discipline-by-discipline essays, to better understand the breadth of their students’ campus experience.

Students’ 13 Core courses invite them to grapple with similar questions of existence; it’s just the tools used to work with them that differ. The discipline of English uses stories in various forms (poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction) to recognize how words and imagination inform and deepen our understanding of our lives.

UP’s ENG 112 is not your typical English class. Rather than serving as an “introduction to literature” (as if students’ long literary education in childhood and high school didn’t count), we call this course “Thinking Through Literature.”

Students practice using creative writing as a lifelong tool for thinking – through problems, through decisions, through difference, through values, and through the complications of language itself. Like so many disciplines, English has moved away from teaching merely the “What” of a fixed body of knowledge, in favor of pursuing the “How” and the “Why” of things. Using literature as a sensory vehicle for ideas, the curriculum of the course is humanist inquiry, not dates of publication, plot memorization, author biographies, witty allusions, or other badges of cocktail-party distinction.

And so, as students complete a series of journal brainstorms, class debates, and argument-based papers, literature invites them to think through the options of life’s hardest conundrums: knowing when to conform and when to resist (Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See), how to achieve an identity in a hypermobile world (Satrapi’s Persepolis), how to enact the most effective form of revenge (Shakespeare’s Tempest), and even how to die (Tennyson’s “Ulysses”). Creative writing thus becomes an opportunity to collectively process and further our lives. For as Mark Edmundson writes, you read classic authors “to see if they may know you better than you know yourself.”

The entire English Department believes in this contribution to the core. Every full-time faculty member in English teaches English 112 (most of us teach two sections per semester). And so all are involved in assessing, shaping, and revising the course, both on the collective level, and in the independent directions we take our particular classes. Faculty are encouraged to energize their course around a theme that a broad set of students will find relevant, enabling students to choose from sections based on such inquiries as Why Read?; Weather, Climate, and Human Experience; Thinking Through Food; Mobility and Words in the World; and others.

Many undergraduates come to English 112 thinking of literature as frivolous. But as Karin Slaughter notes, “Reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.” Students gain this access by wrestling with English 112’s Core Question: “What is the role of beauty, imagination, and feeling in life?” We explore how our relationships are built by emotion, how our imaginations get us through the day, and how narratives structure the lives of humans – the “storytelling animal.” As Brian Doyle puts it, “Stories are the bones of everything: religions, countries, families, marriages, universities….”

All Core courses are built around a Core Goal; English 112 seeks to “Develop the foundational knowledge and skills necessary for informed inquiry, decision making, and communication.” We work toward these skills through rigorous attention to words (considering both the literal and symbolic levels), informal discussions to negotiate interpretations, and presentations of evidence. Students read plays, where a reader takes a subversive peek behind the curtain at a playwright’s plan, and does all casting, staging, and directing in the mind’s theater. They study nonfiction – the “literature of fact,” to find how the communication of truth can be equally shaped toward beauty. They pursue fiction, where characters invite us to witness and poke and prod the ambient social values around us, rather than to adopt them unthinkingly. And they read poetry – the “Olympics of language” – where how an idea communicates is as crucial as what it communicates.

With its Core Skill of writing, English 112 also serves as one of two “Writing Embedded” courses (alongside Philosophy 150). The pair initiates the skill of college-level writing at a broad level, even while being rooted within a specific discipline. Students work from a campus-wide reference (Kirszner & Mandel’s Pocket Cengage Handbook) to learn effective writing strategies, mechanics, and documentation styles. A series of informal and formal writing tasks teach undergraduates to take writing in stages, and to value the process as much as the resulting product. Students compose essays that practice close reading, analysis, pattern recognition, and thesis formation, so that they not only take a stand on how a text might be interpreted, but also assert why it matters. In other words, their papers must reveal how an author is using a story to advance our knowledge beyond common sense on a given subject. Students will later draw upon these writing skills at a more major-specific level when they take at least two “Writing in the Disciplines” courses (usually upper-division, within their field). This reiterative structure enables every UP student to graduate with at least four writing-intensive courses, which reinforce lessons in communicating with clarity, succinctness, accuracy, and persuasiveness. In an electronically connected world, and a global economy increasingly based on information, the skill of effective writing will gain exponential urgency.

Just as UP’s Core program asserts “no discipline by itself is sufficient to discover the truth,” English 112 doesn’t cover a great many things. It avoids the life of the nonverbal (for literature requires language), stories told best by numbers (which we leave to math and social science), outlooks that aspire toward objectivity (for literature insists on being anchored by subjectivity), pursuits that aspire toward certainty (literature values questions more than answers), and so on. What it does cover is the value of wrestling with words – those of others and of our own – in order to get something right in language. Cultivating a trust in the personal, the emotional, the complex, and in the imaginative, English 112 seeks to increase students’ honest awareness of themselves and of their spectrum of options in life.

        I’d be happy to answer further questions about English 112’s role within the Core: larson@up.edu

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Core Matters: PSY 101 – Come on and tell me, who are you?

[Note: this post is the first in what is intended to be an ongoing series describing various core classes that are part of the UP core curriculum. Each began with the general prompt: How does your core course, or how do your department’s core courses, serve UP’s liberal arts core curriculum, and a broader vision of a liberal education?]

In the early weeks of PSY 101, while framing what it means to see through a psychological lens, we spend a good few days working through a classic question in psychology: why are you who you are? Your parents? Yes, but because of their parenting or their genes? And are you really just like your parents? Or is much of what defines you, your taste in music, your politics, your style, your speech, more like your peer group than your parents? And how much, anyway, is from all those many hours you spent in schools? How about all those hours on the playing fields or in drama productions? And what about your DNA, of which you share about 85% with mice, about 98.8% with chimps, and 99.9% with most any other human? Does that help explain why your parents (and your professors) tend to like The Who, while you spent your teenage years on Taylor Swift and Drake.

These, of course, are all versions of the broader nature-nurture question, which most students confront in a variety of classes and thus know well enough to answer ‘both.’ But in our PSY 101 class, tasked with the core element of ‘diversity and difference’, we take the nature-nurture question as an opportunity to think about diversity through a social science lens. What about us, and our psychology, is a product of our social, cultural, and interpersonal experiences? What exactly creates the wonders of human diversity? And, just as importantly, what about us is a product of human nature? Understanding diversity, it turns out, benefits greatly from also being able to understand what does not vary – what aspects of the mind that are relatively universal and predisposed.

Though at UP we give PSY 101 instructors a fair amount of autonomy to tailor the course to their own teaching style, most of us follow a trajectory that is common across American undergraduate psychology. After a small bit of history, theory, and methods to frame the course, most PSY 101 courses start with the more biological side of psychology: how does the brain work, how does it sense and perceive information, and how do conditioning and reinforcement shape behavior? This usually then transitions into more cognitive topics including memory, intelligence, and information processing, while also introducing developmental concepts about change over time and social psychological perspectives on the importance of groups and context. It is only in the final stretch of a PSY 101 course, after establishing a foundation of psychology as a science, that we talk about mental health. This often starts with biopsychosocial perspectives on physical health, and progresses into introductions to psychological disorders and their treatment.

All these topic are leavened with the nature-nurture question and our core questions: “How do relationships and communities function? What is the value of difference?” We specifically ask students to “interpret ways that psychological and social factors vary or are similar across diverse groups of people” and to be able to “explain and analyze the ways that key concepts from psychology such as socialization, identity, and heritably contribute to differences among individuals and groups.”

Because much research in psychology is specifically devoted to understanding diversity, our PSY 101 course has much to draw upon. In my classes, for example, I frame much of the brief introduction to social psychology around research on prejudice and discrimination. This starts with the idea that the human mind is efficiently designed to take short cuts – and to group things together in ways that have social meaning. Drawing on social identity theory, we talk about how easy it is to create enmity between groups that might otherwise have much in common through the use of identity markers, competition, and socially defined groupings (think, for example, of rival sports fans who love the same sport but seem to hate each other). And we open up questions of why contemporary society puts an emphasis on certain identity groups over others, and what might be done if we were thinking about equity from a psychological perspective.

This is a decidedly scientific approach to understanding diversity, and contrasts with a more humanistic approach focused on affective values. In fact, when a group of UP psychology faculty used a core assessment process to do research about understandings of diversity we set out to explicitly test whether scientific understandings associated with humanistic sentiment in our PSY 101 students. For the most part they did not – but that was at least partially because most UP students already rate themselves quite highly on their more humanistic respect for diversity.

The scientific lens on human phenomena is, however, what we psychologists know best – and we think it is a critical piece of a quality liberal arts education. There is a saying that if you care about people, you should care about the social sciences, and we think the particular lens the social sciences offer towards understanding people using empirical methods is essential for any college student. We hope that students leave PSY 101 with a foundation for thinking empirically about any of the issues they confront in their lives – from their prospective career path, to their political values, to their human interactions. We also use PSY 101 to offer a foundation for making that thinking practical: we introduce research skills, interpersonal skills, helping skills, and analytical skills that can be useful in any vocation. And, finally, we hope that reflecting on the implicit questions underlying our course – who are you, and why – contribute to the broader journey of a UP education towards people who successfully integrate head, hands, and heart.

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Core Matters: A (Re) Introduction to the UP Core Curriculum

Starting in the 2017-2018 academic year, as UP began a process to revitalize its liberal arts core curriculum, one of the most frequent comments I’ve heard is that the core has simply become a “checklist.” People still like the idea of the core, and people still believe in the value of the liberal arts. But some of the details about what that all means seem to have gone missing. Somewhere along the way, there seems to have been a diminishing of shared understandings around why the core curriculum characterizes a University of Portland education and why being a comprehensive university with a liberal arts core matters.

As I’ve looked back at the original vision for the core, I’ve come to think this is less a problem of the curriculum itself and more a problem of things taken for granted. The longer we’ve used the core, the more we take it as simple matter-of-fact and starve it of the vibrant discourse so central to a good liberal arts education.

This ‘core matters’ blog project is one small effort to re-engage that discourse, and to provide a resource to anyone interested in the UP core curriculum including those directly involved in the core revitalization. The goal is to use posts on the Teaching & Learning Community Blog to progressively build a compendium of brief essays about what happens (and what could happen) in UP core courses. I have started asking the chairs of departments teaching in the core the following question:

How does your core course, or how do your department’s core courses, serve UP’s liberal arts core curriculum, and a broader vision of a liberal education?

(Note that ‘liberal’ here deriving from the Latin liberalis and is associated with freedom and the functioning of free citizens – aligning also with the University of Portland motto Veritas vos Liberabit, or the ‘truth will set you free’).

The hope is that the chairs will help recruit faculty teaching in their departments’ core courses to write ~1000 word answers to this question for the benefit primarily of current and future UP faculty. The idea is that while most of us know the basic core requirements, and know the general intention of the core, we are often less clear on what happens in specific classes. As proof of concept, I’ve drafted and posted an essay for the core course I know best – the PSY 101: General Psychology course that has fulfilled a social science core requirement for at least the 15 years I’ve been teaching at UP.

Lars Larson, current chair of English and active participant in shaping how we do writing in the core, has agreed to help me shepherd more such essays – and will be posting his own ~1000 words on the English core course next week. We are encouraging other faculty to interpret the above question broadly and be creative in relating it to various disciplines. But we also hope to include some consideration of how a course (or courses) addresses UP’s specific core questions and core goals. The plan is to post these brief essays as they become available through this 2018-2019 academic year so that by the end of the year we have a relatively complete online compendium.

It is also the case that part of the intention is to articulate the broader value of the liberal arts, while also remembering that UP’s liberal arts core is only one part of a broader UP education. The 39 credits of the core constitute less than a third of the overall credit load required to graduate, and an even smaller portion of the holistic UP educational experience given the importance of residentiality, service, faith life, extracurricular activities, and other modes of formation central to a Holy Cross education. So while the liberal arts core, let alone any individual course, does not by itself need to accomplish the entire UP mission, it does provide an essential foundation for what is characteristic of a UP education.

In that vein, it may also be helpful to remember that the liberal arts have historically been distinguished (from other disciplinary endeavors such as the ‘mechanical arts’ or the ‘practical arts’) by an emphasis on the intrinsic value of knowledge and developing broad intellectual capacities such as reason, judgment, aesthetics, and analytical thinking. In his book Why Choose the Liberal Arts? Mark William Roche, former dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, argues that there are three broad ways the liberal arts matter: 1) for its intrinsic value and opportunities for “asking the great questions that give meaning to life”; 2) for cultivating intellectual virtues that are critical to success in any career path or civic engagement; and 3) for contributing to character formation and “the connection to a higher purpose.”

So how might the courses that have perhaps too often become just tick marks on a checklist actually help towards those much grander ideals? We hope to find out in this (cyber) space.