2006 Curriculum: Revising the Curriculum
The impulse to revise UNC’s general education curriculum grew out of a series of reflections, criticisms, and discussions among students and faculty that took place between the mid-1990s and 2003. As part of a thorough institutional self-study carried out in 1995 in advance of Carolina’s reaccreditation review, a large faculty committee conducted an open-ended review of the undergraduate curriculum. Students’ perceptions of a basic incoherence, or unconnectedness, in the structure of our general education requirements (in effect since 1983) emerged as a primary concern in the course of that self-study. Reforms implemented at the behest of a chancellor’s Task Force on Intellectual Climate in 1997 (e.g., the creation of a First Year Seminars Program and an Office of Undergraduate Research, the development of the Summer Reading Program) addressed some of the concerns identified in the 1995 self-study, but in 1999 the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences decided to appoint a Curriculum Revision Steering Committee charged to conduct a comprehensive review and rethinking of the general education curriculum. That committee sought input from a large number of faculty from all across campus, and the entire University community weighed in with opinions in response to interim reports and early drafts of the proposed curriculum at a series of forums in 2000-2002.
The Steering committee began its work with the premise that UNC should strive “to cultivate the skills, knowledge, values, and habits that will allow graduates to lead personally enriching and socially responsible lives as effective citizens of rapidly changing, richly diverse, and increasingly interconnected local, national, and worldwide communities.” The committee further agreed that the undergraduate experience should “foster in Carolina graduates the curiosity, initiative, integrity, and adaptability requisite for success in the complex, demanding environment of the twenty-first century world.” With these general objectives in mind, the committee set out to craft a more coherent and integrated general education curriculum. The results of the Steering Committee’s work are most fully represented in the draft version of the curriculum (version 1.4) approved by the Faculty Council in April, 2003.
Details about the new curriculum are available on this website in outline and in-depth versions, but the key differences between the old curriculum and the new “Making Connections” curriculum can be listed as follows:
- The structure of the new General Education requirements constitutes what should be a more coherent and integrated educational experience for Carolina’s undergraduates. Artificial barriers between certain kinds of courses and requirements have been removed; students may now use their major(s) and minor(s) to enhance the General Education experience, and vice versa; and students are encouraged to make meaningful connections—cultural connections, disciplinary connections, connections between the Academy and the world beyond its walls—as they satisfy requirements at all levels.
- The General Education program has been shortened; for BA majors in the College, this means that Gen Ed requirements can be met with 51 hours of course work versus 57 plus a swim test in the old curriculum. The reduction in required hours opens up more space for electives or for an additional major or minor.
- The theme of internationalization/globalization is subtly integrated into the new Gen Ed requirements.The increased emphasis on global awareness and international citizenship is visible in new requirements, such as the Global Issues and Experiential Education requirements (EE can be satisfied by studying abroad) and in the clarification, intensification and reaffirmation of longstanding requirements, such as the Beyond the North Atlantic World requirement (formerly a Non-Western Comparative course) and the eventually-to-be-implemented Foreign Language Enhancement requirement.
- The junior-senior level requirements have an entirely new look, and in either form—whether in the Distributive form (involving the selection of any three non-introductory courses from Divisions outside one’s major) or in the Integrative form (involving completion of an interdisciplinary Cluster Program devoted to a broad and overarching theme), the courses taken to satisfy this “Supplemental General Education” requirement encourage purposeful “connection-making” on the part of students. For students choosing the Integrative option, the prime connections will be interdisciplinary in nature, as faculty and students explore different disciplinary approaches to a common problem or theme; for students choosing the Distributive option, the connections are more likely to grow from an individual’s specific intellectual interests or the particular ways in which a major field can supplement, or be supplemented by, perspectives derived from very different fields.