CLCS 107 - The Liberal Arts in Question

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

We plan to curate conversations of different kinds and in various locations (e.g., Baccios, The Retreat, Waryas Park, Rose Parlor, Adriance Library). In these conversations, we place the idea and experience of the liberal arts ‘in question’ from many substantive perspectives, including our disciplinary locations, which we will also place ‘in question’. The movement into and from different material or built spaces on the residential campus parallels the movement into and from different disciplinary contexts – the shape of a student’s education at the college. Their exposures are, at the end of every day, not housed in one place or in one department, but in a multifaceted, residential educational environment that calls upon them as full persons. This is a college course ‘intensive’ therefore in its constitutive sense and one that allows us to ask and explore questions with students about the college and why and how we shape the spaces and contexts of their intellectual engagements every day the ways that we do. Our interface and extension with the summer immersion students, who have already expressed an interest in community involvement, is a way of going deeper, with more time, and with their whole experience (intellectual and embodied) as they begin their broader educational exposure and journeys at the college.

Our culminating exercise involves boldly placing ‘assessment in question’ through reflective and performative engagement with both conventional and less conventional modes of evaluation (e.g., portfolios, exams, etc.). Andrew Bush, Sophia Harvey, Candice Lowe Swift, Himadeep Muppidi.

Course Format: INT