Trinity announces plan to revamp Curriculum 2000

The Arts and Sciences Council announced a review and modernization of the Trinity College curriculum to take place over the next three years.
The Arts and Sciences Council announced a review and modernization of the Trinity College curriculum to take place over the next three years.

For the first time in a decade, Curriculum 2000 is receiving a facelift.

Over the next three years, the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences faculty will work to revise the curriculum, bringing it into the digital age and clarifying the logic behind the guidelines. Trinity Dean Laurie Patton announced the change at Thursday's Arts and Sciences Council meeting—noting that it is not a dramatic overhaul of the current standards, but rather a "big tweak."

Throughout last year, the Arts and Sciences curriculum committee engaged in a "silent phase" of thinking about Curriculum 2000 and identifying possible areas for revision. Now, a three-year process of analysis, proposals, discussion and voting will begin.

"Most of our curriculum is working well, and a major overhaul was not necessary," Patton said. "However, [faculty] had clear concerns about how the curriculum might be working in the 2014 pedagogical and scholarly environment."

The exact areas of focus for the revision have not yet been determined. Broadly speaking, the updated curriculum is intended to create more opportunities for students to explore, to simplify the guidelines behind the requirements and to better integrate interdisciplinarity.

The current curriculum was introduced in 2000 and modified in 2004, but Duke's educational landscape has changed significantly since then, Patton noted. When faculty last updated the curriculum, programs such as DukeEngage, Bass Connections, DukeImmerse and the annual Winter Forum did not yet exist. Opportunities for service learning and study abroad were not as extensive, and the idea of receiving credit for online courses was not even a question.

This revision will allow faculty to consider how these offerings might be integrated into the curriculum—questioning what constitutes a "course" in the modern age, Patton said.

The past 10 years have seen changes not only in Duke's academic opportunities, but also in its faculty, said Thomas Robisheaux, chairman of the Arts and Sciences Council and Fred W. Schaffer professor of history.

"We like to say that the faculty own the curriculum, but I'm very sobered when I realize that since the last curriculum revision, two-thirds of Duke faculty have turned over," Robisheaux said. "Literally two-thirds of the Arts and Sciences faculty do not own the curriculum."

The coming year will see weekly meetings of the "Imagining the Duke Curriculum" faculty committee, focused on diagnosing areas of the curriculum that should be targeted for change. The 2015-16 academic year will center on drafting proposals for the revision, and 2016-17 will involve faculty discussion and voting on the final edition of the curriculum.

"We want faculty writ large to be reflected in the curriculum," Patton said. "This process will require a robust and capacious sense of the common good, not a narrow interest in defending a particular piece."

The current curriculum mandates that students fulfill the requirements for their major, in addition to taking courses in five Areas of Knowledge and six Modes of Inquiry.

In other business:

Patton reviewed Trinity's finances for the 2013-14 fiscal year, which ended June 30. The school finished the year with a $92,000 surplus—a significant improvement from 2012-13, which ended with a deficit of $2.8 million.

Budget relief was provided in particular by global education programs and by the summer sessions.

The annual fund, which brought in $1 million more than its goal, also helped to ease the deficit.

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