Gen Ed Courses Mirror Old Core

Although course development for the new General Education curriculum got off to a slow start, the implementation committee seems to be picking up the pace.

But the three most recently approved courses—which come on top of the five that already got the go-ahead earlier this semester—mark only slight changes from existing classes.

Two courses have been essentially transplanted from the current Core program. History professor Ann M. Blair’s Historical Studies A-27: “Reason and Faith in the West” will count toward the “Culture and Belief” requirement, while Literature & Arts A-64: “American Literature and the American Environment,” to be taught by English professor Lawrence Buell in fall 2009, will fulfill the “Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding” requirement.

The third course is a modified version of a current class that does not count for Core credit. “Medicine and the Body in East Asia and Europe”—which is based on East Asian Studies 170 and taught by East Asian Studies professor Shigehisa Kuriyama—will count toward the “Culture and Belief” requirement.

Kuriyama’s adapted course will incorporate some unconventional approaches. For example, Kuriyama is planning on assigning problem sets, even though it is a humanities course.

“Instead of just being lectured on what the important things are to do, you also have puzzles to solve mainly by electronic resources,” he said.

“And by solving the puzzles, you teach yourself a lot of the history.”

Kuriyama also said he hopes to assign students to podcast their thoughts on the course reading and make video presentations using iMovie.

“I think it’ll be a lot of fun,” Kuriyama said. “My hope is to get some of the best [podcasts] that are really original contributions up to the public domain so that people have the opportunity to make their contributions to world scholarship,” he said.

Buell said he hopes for his literature course to be similarly unique.

He said in an e-mailed statement that he’s planning on requiring “a self-directed outdoor practicum in the phenomenology of place and, with it, a series of informal creative writing assignments.”

Both Kuriyama and Buell said that they did not find it difficult to transition their courses into the new curriculum.

The professors said that they also corresponded with Jewish studies professor Jay M. Harris, the chair of the Gen Ed implementation committee, throughout the approval process.

Buell said that he found the process “smooth and professional” and that the committee, communicating to him through Harris, was “very encouraging all down the line.”

Although only eight courses have been approved so far, Dean of the Faculty Michael D. Smith has said that he is optimistic about the direction that Gen Ed is taking.

“Remember—Gen Ed’s not starting in the fall, so there’s not a fixed number of courses we absolutely need to have,” he said in an interview on Friday. “Jay would be telling [interim Dean of the College] David [R. Pilbeam] and me if it were not on schedule.”

Blair, who is teaching the course on reason and faith in the West, could not be reached for comment.

—Maxwell L. Child and Christian B. Flow contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.