2006 Curriculum: Cluster Programs
A Cluster Program consists of 6-8 courses that represent different disciplinary perspectives on a common theme. One of the courses serves as a “core” course in the cluster, taken by all students, and the other courses explore and amplify distinct elements within the cluster’s organizing theme. BA students can satisfy the Supplemental General Education requirement by taking three courses from a single cluster. This option for fulfilling the Supplemental requirements is called the “Integrative option.”
Perhaps more than any other feature of the new curriculum, the cluster program exemplifies the “Connection-Making” possibilities built into the program of General Education. Already having been introduced to the various disciplinary “Approaches” to knowledge, and having detected the “Connections” that exist between distinct cultures, places, and conceptual spaces, undergraduates at the junior-senior level are invited to enter onto a common terrain where they can identify, explore, and evaluate the epistemological connections that make inter-disciplinary conversation possible as well as the very real disconnections that make such conversation both challenging and essential. In some cases, the cluster experience can even grow from, or be linked to, a student’s special intellectual interests, since one of the three courses in the cluster may also be used for major or minor credit.
Cluster programs are created by faculty, and approved by the Administrative Boards of the General College and the College of Arts and Sciences.
Guidelines for faculty:
- Students take three courses to satisfy the Integrative option of Supplemental General Education, but an approved Cluster Program must contain at least six courses, and as many as eight.
- Cluster Programs will sometimes involve several new courses, but the nucleus of a cluster will most often be formed from existing courses in the curriculum.
- The courses in a Cluster are to be taught by faculty from at least two different Divisions (Fine Arts; Humanities; Social and Behavioral Sciences; Natural Sciences and Mathematics) or Schools, and at least one faculty member teaching in the cluster must have a primary appointment in the College of Arts and Sciences.
- Clusters must contain a “core” course specific to the Cluster and offered on an annual basis. In some cases, cluster organizers may wish to develop multiple core courses for different constituencies (see, for example, the comment about Maymester below.)
- Except in those rare cases where the subject content of a cluster must be introduced to some students through lower-level courses, cluster courses should be numbered above 199
- Courses in a given Cluster Program may serve multiple purposes. That is, not all students in a particular course will follow the Cluster Program of which it is a part; some may take the course as an elective, as a major course, or to satisfy a Connections requirement. The thematic focus of a cluster should therefore be flexible and non-exclusive.
- The course-based experiences of the students in a Cluster Program may be enriched through extra-curricular contact and activities, and by regular “culminating” events such as workshops, public lectures, or research presentations.
- Cluster courses may satisfy Connections requirements, including Experiential Education
- Clusters may include Study Abroad courses/programs.
- Faculty teaching in interdisciplinary curricula, and hoping to use cross-listed courses from those curricula to form the basis of a cluster, should make every effort to include courses from a variety of majors, even if the cross-listed courses in their own curricula happen to cross Divisions.
- Faculty who plan to incorporate Maymester courses into their proposed clusters should make every effort not to make the Maymester course the “core” course in the cluster—unless an alternative core is also proposed.
Approved Cluster Programs are included on this page and listed in the Undergraduate Bulletin beginning in 2008.