Category: Core Curriculum

Weber, R.J., Lee, J.S., Buzan, M., Flanagan, A.M., Hadley, D., Rutz, C. & Sorger, T. (2010). Core texts, community, and culture: Working together in liberal education.  Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

This selection of papers from the tenth annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses offers an eclectic mix of commentaries on core texts which participants have used in their own courses.  The introduction addresses both the value of requiring a corpus of core texts (“works of major cultural significance”) in liberal education with particular emphasis on the creation of community.

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Wudel, D., Weber, R., & Lee, J. S. (2006). Reforming liberal education and the core after the twentieth century: Selected papers from the eight annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, Montreal, Canada, April 4-7, 2002. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

This selection of papers from the eighth annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses offers selected brief papers grouped under five headings: Building Programs, Assessment, Core Texts (Old, New, nontraditional), Science & Humanities, and Problems and Possibilities of a Liberal Education.  A common theme is the centrality of “core text programs” to liberal education.

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The university “Core Curriculum” (not to be confused with the “Common Core” K12 Curriculum) is a set of courses required by all undergraduates, regardless of their major.  The purpose is to ensure that students are exposed to texts and issues considered essential to a broad education, and to foster community through common reading and discussion.  A corpus of essential readings (“great works” or “foundational texts”) has a long history in liberal arts education.  Most universities today have some form of Core Curriculum, but a 2010 ACTA report concluded that “by and large, higher education has abandoned a coherent content-rich general education curriculum”.  The institutions surveyed included several major Catholic Universities.

For Catholic Universities, the Core Curriculum has the additional function of familiarizing students with the Catholic intellectual tradition and issues related to it.  In addition to the issues often accompanying a Core Curriculum (e.g. who should oversee it, what should be taught, who should teach it, how much freedom should individual faculty have in assigning readings, how should “regular” faculty teaching in the Core be compensated, and where will the money come from) there is the challenge of balancing a “traditional” Catholic education with a “modern” global and inclusive perspective.