Course Proposal Form for
Interdisciplinary Cultural Heritage Courses
Please provide the following information about your course to the Cultural Heritage Committee as a place to begin in reaching a consensus that your course fulfills the requirements of the program. The committee will respond either with an approval of the course as submitted or with questions or concerns and an invitation to talk about how they could be addressed.
1. Disciplines the course is intended to cover (literature and/or philosophy and/or history).
2. Title and one-paragraph description for the Cultural Heritage website (aimed at students who might take the course).
3. A syllabus that includes the general outline of the course and the kinds of course work required (reading, writing, exams, etc.). The committee will review your syllabus with respect to the three Cultural Heritage objectives contained in the revision of the Cultural Heritage program approved by the Academic Affairs Board in January 2006 and the fourteen criteria summarized in the Course Guidelines developed by the Cultural Heritage Committee. The Guidelines are appended, and criteria numbers 1, 2, and 3 repeat the objectives approved by the AcAB. If your syllabus does not make clear how your course meets any of the guidelines, please include further brief explanation or sample materials such as paper assignments or exams. Guidelines 7 and 13 in particular might not be addressed in a syllabus.
4. A short statement that explains how your course has been or will be informed by consultation with colleagues from the relevant disciplines other than your own (guideline 14).
5. Your plans for assessment.
February 2006
All Cultural Heritage courses (both single-discipline and interdisciplinary) will:
1. Teach students to use the fundamental tools common to the humanities (reading, writing, asking good questions, constructing arguments) both to enrich their lives and to achieve more practical goals.
2. Teach students to read primary historical, literary, and philosophical texts critically, imaginatively, and reflectively, in order to understand themselves, others, and the world better.
3. Teach students to understand the Western cultural inheritance, its chronological development, its strengths and weaknesses, and (in some cases) its relation to non-Western cultures and their development and strengths and weaknesses.
4. Give consideration to the western European tradition, even if its primary focus is elsewhere.
5. Emphasize the most influential sources and a variety of aspects and traditions within the culture(s) and time period(s) it covers.
6. Be substantially international in scope.
7. Require a minimum of 20-25 pages of writing,
at least 8-10 of which are in final form(s). (For courses worth fewer than 4
credits, these page ranges should vary accordingly.)
In addition, interdisciplinary courses will:
8. Emphasize at least two disciplines from among history, literary studies, and philosophy.
9. Devote roughly half of the course’s content to each discipline in a two-discipline course, or one third to each in a three-discipline course.
10. Deal with a historical period of at least two centuries, going into depth by looking at the way literature, philosophy, and history (at least two) illuminate the culture of the era.
11. Emphasize the development of thought and culture, not just be a study of an existing thought and culture.
12. Read texts that are recognized as important in each of the disciplines covered.
13. Use methods appropriate to each discipline.
14. Be informed by consultation with colleagues from the relevant discipline(s) other than that of the instructor.
The revised statement of the Cultural Heritage requirement, approved by the Academic Affairs Board in January 2006, places the goals and guidelines for Cultural Heritage courses in the context of the overarching goals for a Hope College education: “Liberally educated people should be able to explore deeply what is involved in living a fully human life and being responsible persons, and engage vigorously and honestly with themselves, with their world, and with what is other than themselves—culturally, temporally, religiously and ontologically.” It then articulates numbers 1, 2, and 3 above as the three major goals for the Cultural Heritage portion of the Hope’s humanities General Education requirements in order to articulate how it contributes to such overarching objectives of liberal arts education. Numbers 4 and 8-11 are also drawn from that college-approved statement.
Western and other cultures: Together numbers 3 and 4 open two new, related issues about how broad the focus of these courses should be and how much consideration courses with a focus other than on the Western European cultural heritage should give to that heritage—issues which guidelines number 5 and 6 begin to address. The notion of cultural heritage at the center of the requirement is the study of the heritage of the culture in which we find ourselves. Of course the identity of the “we” is a problem, and the inclusion of non-western cultures attempts to recognize that we are increasingly multicultural and our inheritance is increasingly global. But this is primarily a broadening of the core idea, and suggests that the focus of each course should remain broad.
Given Hope’s location and identity, the Western European cultural inheritance seems like an inescapable topic for each of these courses in at least some respect. Trying to set any sort of minimum requirement for how much attention courses with a non-Western focus should give to Western culture, however, seems awkward and impertinent. We will need to remain in conversation about how the study of both Western and non-Western cultures contribute to the overall goals of the Cultural Heritage requirement.
Skills: All Cultural Heritage courses are meant to develop some basic skills and habits as part of the general education program. These are mentioned in goal #1 above and understood to be included as means to the other major goals. In addition, the catalog relates these courses to the cross-curricular themes of the general education program by specifying that these courses will “emphasize the ‘Knowing How’ criterion of critical thinking and the ‘Knowing About’ criterion of enabling students to explore and understand central questions of human identity.”
Among the skills, these courses
have also been charged to emphasize writing (#7), and the college has developed
guidelines for teaching writing in general education courses, available on the
general education discussion board at Hope College
General Discussion Board: Cross-Curricular Themes: Writing. The 20-25 pages of writing could include
rough drafts, journals, in- or out-of-class responses involving sustained
writing-to-think, substantial exam essays, etc. Such writing would probably not
include short-answer tests, short-answer worksheets, or exercises emphasizing
recall rather than expression and/or critical thinking. The 8-10 pages of
final-form writing could include traditional essays and research papers and/or
any number of nonfictional or fictional genres, so
long as competency with standard, finished-draft conventions played a role in
their evaluation, as appropriate, such as correct grammar, mechanics,
formatting, etc. (Desired discipline-specific conventions would need to be
taught explicitly within the given course.) It is suggested that research for
some of this writing be required, as well as practice in MLA style source
citation and documentation (or another documentation style that is desired but
therefore taught explicitly within the given course).
Interdisciplinarity: The goals articulated in numbers 1, 2, and 3 above emphasize putting the disciplines into practice as means, and we have dropped the list of objectives originally attached to IDS 171 and 172 that involved studying the nature of the disciplines themselves. Criteria 8 and 9 simply require attention to multiple disciplines, while criterion number 10’s reduction of chronological coverage from the previous standard is meant in part to make real interdisciplinarity more achievable. Criteria 11, 12, and 13 state some minimum expectations for the practice of the three disciplines appropriate to the larger goals of Cultural Heritage courses within general education. But there is a host of ways to practice each discipline with integrity in an interdisciplinary course, and trying to list them would tend to constrain creativity. Nonetheless perhaps a few more comments would help in preparing course proposals and materials.
One way of showing that each discipline is getting roughly equal attention (#10 above), which will be familiar to those who have taught in IDS 171-172 teams, is the method of counting the number of days in the syllabus in which each discipline is emphasized. Attention to each discipline might also show up in a syllabus as topic headings to accompany readings, e.g. with Augustine’s Confessions, “The Nature of Evil” vs. “The First Autobiography” vs. “The Education of a Fourth-Century Roman.” But the Cultural Heritage Committee welcomes other ways of articulating how a course fulfills this criterion of balanced attention.
Because the humanities disciplines themselves are central to the Western cultural inheritance, some conscious and explicit attention to them is still appropriate and encouraged. A course might make its choices of method an explicit focus with students by considering what kinds of questions historians/philosophers/literary critics ask. For instance, history is centrally concerned with the causes of historical change across time.
In the end, though, the most important way of maintaining real interdisciplinarity will be continuing contact with colleagues in other disciplines. The team approach has succeeded in this respect, but without a requirement to teach in teams we need to find other additional ways to maintain this kind of dialogue. Criterion 14 requires consultation across disciplines without specifying what shape it will take. The purpose of such consultation is to stay in touch with what colleagues in other disciplines (who may well differ among themselves about the practice of their own discipline) would recognize as the practice of their discipline. Other kinds of regular collegiality across the Humanities departments will be a focus of faculty development initiatives for cultural heritage faculty.