Curriculum by Design
ByPublisher Description
This book tells the story of how a team of colleagues at Boston College took an unusual approach (working with a design consultancy) to renewing their core and in the process energized administrators, faculty, and students to view liberal arts education as an ongoing process of innovation. It aims to provide insight into what they did and why they did it and to provide a candid account of what has worked and what has not worked. Although all institutions are different, they believe their experiences can provide guidance to others who want to change their general education curriculum or who are being asked to teach core or general education courses in new ways.
The book also includes short essays by a number of faculty colleagues who have been teaching in BC’s new innovative core courses, providing practical advice about the challenges of trying interdisciplinary teaching, team teaching, project-or problem-based learning, intentional reflection, and other new structures and pedagogies for the first time. It will also address some of the nuts and bolts issues they have encountered when trying to create structures to make curriculum change sustainable over time and to foster ongoing innovation.
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About Mary Thomas Crane
Mary Thomas Crane is the Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English and director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Boston College. She works on early modern English literature and is the author of Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton University Press, 1993), Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton University Press, 2000), and Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). She has taught the Enduring Question course “Revolutionary Media: How Reading Changes Us.”
David Quigley
David Quigley is the provost and dean of faculties and a professor of history at Boston College. He was previously dean of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at BC. He is the author of Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy (2004). He has taught the Enduring Question course “Worlds of Moby-Dick: What Historical Forces Shape a Book’s Greatness.”
Andy Boynton
Andy Boynton is the John and Linda Powers Family Dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. He is the author of The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen and has a blog on leadership and innovation on Forbes .com.
Other books by Andy Boynton
Allison Adair
Allison Adair is associate professor of the practice in the English Department at Boston College and specializes in creative writing, with a focus on poetry and flash fiction and a special interest in digital humanities. She is the author of poems published in many venues, including North American Review, Southwest Review, American Poetry Review, Pushcart Prize XLIII, and of prose in Grub Daily. She taught the Enduring Question course “Truth-telling in Literature.”
Other books by Allison Adair
Lynne Anderson
Lynne Anderson is the director of English Language Learning at Boston College. Trained in applied linguistics, she teaches writing, literature, and oral language production courses. She is the author of Breaking Bread: Recipes and Stories from Immigrant Kitchens. She is interested in the intersections among language, culture, identity, and food. She teaches narrative nonfiction writing workshops on the topic of food and culture, including a course abroad in Paris each spring for BC’s Office of International Programs. She taught the Enduring Question course titled “Roots and Routes: Writing Identity, Migration, and Culture.”
Robert Bartlett
Robert C. Bartlett serves as the Behrakis Professor in Hellenic Political Studies at Boston College. He is the author or editor of eight books, including Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras’ Challenge to Socrates (2016) and an edition of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (2019), both published by the University of Chicago Press. His principal area of research is classical political philosophy. In conjunction with Aspen Brinton, he taught an Enduring Question seminar titled “Justice and War: The Ancients,” which was largely devoted to a study of Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians.
William Bole
William Bole is the director of Content Development at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. He is co-author of several books, including (with Bob Abernethy) The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World. His writing has focused on religion, politics, business, and higher education, and has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times, as well as America, Commonweal, Christian Century, Forbes, Utne Reader, and other outlets. He spent fifteen years as a reporter for wire services sponsored or syndicated by the New York Times, Associated Press, Newhouse, and Knight Ridder, and for nearly a decade as a research and writing fellow at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center.
Other books by William Bole
Toby Bottorf
Toby Bottorf leads the Client Engagement team at EPAM Continuum. He previously spent nine years leading project teams to design solutions for complex human and technical systems. His service design work builds on a career in graphic design, and interface and interaction design. Toby’s passion is understanding where people find connection in their everyday interactions with products, services, and complex systems. He takes a systematic, consilient approach to identifying the right ideas and their emotional and functional criteria for success. He wants to build new systems that in addition to being very smart, also have great emotional intelligence, or at least good manners. Most new technology is plenty smart but very rude. Toby holds a Master’s degree in communications design from the Institute of Design at IIT and a B.A. in art from Yale University. He is a frequent writer, guest lecturer, conference speaker, competition judge, and critic.
Andy Boynton
Andy Boynton is the John and Linda Powers Family Dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. He is the author of The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen and has a blog on leadership and innovation on Forbes .com.
Other books by Andy Boynton
John Butler
Jack Butler, S.J., is a member of the East Coast Province of Jesuits and the Haub Vice President for University Mission and Ministry at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University, Maryland, and has been a member of the community for twenty years.
Daniel Callahan
Daniel Callahan is an associate professor of music at Boston College. His first book manuscript, The Dancer from the Music, explores the use of music in American modern dance. His article on John Cage and Merce Cunningham, “The Gay Divorce of Music and Dance,” appears in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. He previously taught at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D., and the University of Chicago, where he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. He will work on his second book project, Conducting Oneself, exploring the choreographies and identities of orchestra conductors who challenge the maestro stereotype as a 2019-2020 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Mary Thomas Crane
Mary Thomas Crane is the Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English and director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Boston College. She works on early modern English literature and is the author of Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton University Press, 1993), Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton University Press, 2000), and Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). She has taught the Enduring Question course “Revolutionary Media: How Reading Changes Us.”
Hanne Eisenfeld
Hanne Eisenfeld is Behrakis Assistant Professor in Hellenic Studies at Boston College. She specializes in archaic and classical Greek poetry and Greek religion and myth. Her current project focuses on a set of mythical figures in Pindar’s victory odes who challenge the boundaries between mortality and immortality. She teaches the Enduring Question course “Life and Death in Ancient Greece.”
Thomas Epstein
Thomas Epstein is associate professor of the practice of the humanities at Boston College. He specializes in modern and contemporary Russian culture, especially poetry and cinema. His most recent publications include “Time Out: Dead End as Exit in Viktor Krivulin’s novel Shmon” (Novoe literaturnaia obozrenie, 2018), and “Russian Beat: Wilderness of Mirrors,” in The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature (Routledge, 2018). He is currently preparing for publication a book of annotated translations by the contemporary Russian poet Elena Shvarts, titled After Paradise. He taught the Enduring Question course “Life and Death in Russian Literature.”
Brian Gareau
Brian J. Gareau is an associate professor of sociology at Boston College. He was named associate dean for the Core in 2018 and is responsible for overseeing the University Core Curriculum. As associate dean, he chairs the University Core Renewal Committee and works with faculty and academic departments on their engagement with the Core Curriculum. His scholarship focuses on the sociology of global environmental governance, especially the governance of ozone layer depletion and global climate change. He also publishes on theorizations of society/nature relations, alternative development, and agri-food systems. His latest book, Organic Futures (Yale University Press, 2017), co-authored with former BC undergraduate Connor J. Fitzmaurice, was translated into Japanese in 2018. Gareau’s latest project involves conducting research on the links between cranberry production in Massachusetts and global climate change. He has co-taught the Complex Problem course “Global Implications of Climate Change” with Tara Pisani Gareau.
Tara Gareau
Tara Pisani Gareau is associate professor of the practice at Boston College and the director of the Environmental Studies Program. Her research aims to apply ecological principles to restore ecological function and resiliency to agricultural landscapes. Her research projects include examining the effect of native plant hedgerows on biological control services in California, investigating the effects of tillage and cover crops on epigeal arthropod communities in Pennsylvania forage and feed systems, studying dragonflies and damselflies for their potential to regulate pest populations in cranberry bog systems, and assessing the impact of climate change on the sustainability of cranberry bogs in Massachusetts. She has co-taught the Complex Problem course “Global Implications of Climate Change” with Brian Gareau.
Elizabeth Graver
Elizabeth Graver is a professor of English at Boston College and is the author of four novels: The Honey Thief, Unravelling, Awake, and The End of the Point. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, and she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently at work on a novel inspired by the migration story of her Sephardic Turkish grandmother. Her Enduring Question course is titled “Roots and Routes: Reading Identity, Migration, and Culture.”
Other books by Elizabeth Graver
Stacy Grooters
Stacy Grooters is the executive director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Boston College. Her research examines roles of instructor and student identities in the classroom, as well as questions of diversity in higher education. Her most recent publication examines the POD Network’s scholarly engagement with diversity in its publications and conference. She received a Ph.D. in English from University of Washington in Seattle.
Régine Michelle Jean-Charles
Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is a Black feminist literary scholar and cultural critic specializing in francophone studies. She is the director of Africana studies, Dean’s Professor of Culture and Social Justice, and professor of Africana studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Northeastern University. The focus of her scholarship and teaching on world literatures in French is on Black France, Sub Saharan Africa, Haiti, and the Haitian Diaspora. She is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State Universiry Press, 2014), Martin Luther King and The Trumpet of Conscience Today (Orbis Books, 2021), and Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2022).
Other books by Régine Michelle Jean-Charles
Gregory Kalscheur
Gregory Kalscheur, S.J., joined the faculty of the Boston College Law School in 2003. Since 2014 he has served as the dean of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College. He received his A.B. in 1985 from Georgetown University, and his J.D. in 1988 from the University of Michigan, where he served on the editorial board of the Michigan Law Review. After law school, he clerked for Judge Kenneth F. Ripple, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and worked as a litigator at Hogan & Hartson in Washington, D.C. He received his M.Div. and S.T.L. from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology and an LL.M. from Columbia University. Father Kalscheur’s primary teaching and research interests include law and religion, constitutional law, civil procedure, Catholic social thought and the law, Ignatian spirituality and legal education, and the connection between the Catholic intellectual tradition and the academic mission of the contemporary, Jesuit, Catholic university.
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace
Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace is a professor emeritus of English at Boston College. She specializes in British eighteenth-century literature and culture and feminist and cultural theory. She is also interested in contemporary British culture, including drama, the novel, and film. She has published on eighteenth-century women writers, eighteenth-century consumer culture, and on the way that the British slave trade has been remembered and represented in the popular imagination (The British Slave Trade and Public Memory [Columbia University Press, 2006]). She taught the Enduring Question course “Living in the Material World” with Dunwei Wang.
Other books by Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace
Prasannan Parthasarathi
Prasannan Parthasarathi is a professor of South Asian history at Boston College. He is the author of The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants, and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which received the Jerry Bentley Book Prize of the World History Association. He is now working on a study of agriculture and the environment in nineteenth-century South India. His articles have appeared in Past and Present, the Journal of Social History, Modern Asian Studies, and International Labor and Working-Class History. He is a senior editor of International Labor and Working-Class History and served on the editorial board of the American Historical Review. He teaches with Juliet Schor a Complex Problem course titled “Planet in Peril.”
David Quigley
David Quigley is the provost and dean of faculties and a professor of history at Boston College. He was previously dean of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at BC. He is the author of Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy (2004). He has taught the Enduring Question course “Worlds of Moby-Dick: What Historical Forces Shape a Book’s Greatness.”
Brian Robinette
Brian D. Robinette is an associate professor of theology at Boston College. He researches and teaches in the areas of systematic, philosophical, and spiritual theology, with special interests in anthropology, secularity, and contemplative theory/practice. He is the author of the award-winning Grammars of Resurrection: A Christian Theology of Presence and Absence (Crossroad, 2009) and is currently working on a theology of creation, tentatively titled The Difference Nothing Makes: Creation, Christ, Contemplation.
Juliet Schor
Juliet B. Schor is a professor of sociology at Boston College. Her books include the New York Times best seller The Overworked American. She is also the author of The Overspent American, Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude, and True Wealth. Schor has written extensively on issues of working time, consumption, and environmental sustainability. Since 2011 Schor has been studying the “sharing economy,” including both large platforms and smaller community initiatives. Schor is a former Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, and Brookings Institution Fellow, and in 2014 she received the American Sociological Association’s award for Public Understanding of Sociology. Schor is the chair of the board of directors of the Better Future Project, the parent organization of 350MA, a large climate activist organization in Massachusetts. She co-teaches “Planet in Peril: The History and Future of Human Impacts on the Planet.”
Sylvia Sellers-García
Sylvia Sellers-García is a professor of history at Boston College. She is a historian of colonial Latin America, focusing on documentation, archival studies, and marginality. Her book Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery (Stanford University Press, 2013), considers the relationship between documents and distance in the Spanish Empire. The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts (Yale University Press, 2020), tells the story of a sensational crime that took place in Guatemala City in 1800. Sellers-García also writes fiction for adults and young readers, several of which examine the intersection of the fantastical and the historical. An enduring interest for Sellers-García is the meeting point of fiction and history, the related meeting point of academic writing and popular writing, and what we can learn from them about ways of knowing. With Allison Adair, she teaches the Enduring Question course “Truth Telling in History.”
Elizabeth H. Shlala
Elizabeth H. Shlala is the assistant dean of the Core and associate professor of the practice at Boston College. She is a historian of the Middle East and North Africa and is also a visiting scholar at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the T. H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. Her work explores the nexus of modern migration and law in the Middle East. Her main research areas are twofold: legal imperialism and colonial hybridity in the late Ottoman period and the social and economic impact of contemporary global migration. Her most recent book is titled The Late Ottoman Empire and Egypt: Hybridity, Law, and Gender.
Min Hyoung Song
Min Hyoung Song is a professor of English at Boston College, where he is chair of the English Department and directs the Asian American Studies Program. He is a participating faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program and an affiliated faculty member of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program. His teaching and research have increasingly become focused on the intersections of race, ecology, and aesthetics. He is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled “Everyday Denial and Climate Lyricism.” He is the author of The Children of 1964: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American (which won several awards) and Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, and is general co-editor of the four-volume Cambridge University Press series Asian American Literature in Transition. He taught the Enduring Question course “Humans, Nature, and Culture.”
Jenna Tonn
Jenna Tonn is an assistant professor of the practice and director of undergraduate studies for the human-centered engineering program at Boston College. Dr. Tonn received her Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University and taught in the Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard before arriving at BC as one of the first cohort of Core Fellows. Her research centers on the social and cultural history of scientific knowledge, with a specific focus on women and gender in STEM. She is currently working on a book about masculinity and experimental biology in the nineteenth-century United States. Her next project is a history of radical feminist biology. Dr. Tonn holds a B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University. She designed and taught the hands-on experiential laboratory practicum (STEM Lab) for the Complex Problem course “Science and Technology in American Society.”
Holly VandeWall
Holly VandeWall is associate professor of the practice in the Philosophy Department at Boston College. She received her Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame and also holds a Master’s degree in science and ethics from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Her research includes work on the provision of scientific advice for environmental policy, the history of U.S. water policy, environmental ethics, and the use of history and philosophy of science in the improvement of scientific literacy. She is co-author of a textbook in the history and philosophy of science with Bloomsbury Press. Her Enduring Question course was titled “Inquiring about Humans and Nature.”
Dunwei Wang
Dunwei Wang is a professor of chemistry and chair of the chemistry department at Boston College. He graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China with a bachelor of science degree in 2000. He continued his education at Stanford until 2005, where he earned his Ph.D. in chemistry. After two years of postdoctoral research at Caltech, he joined Boston College in 2007, serving as assistant, associate, and full professor of chemistry. He leads a team researching on solar energy conservation and storage. He is also the chair of the Chemistry Department at Boston College.
Other books by Dunwei Wang
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