Craig Pepin
Professor
Biography
Craig Pepin is Lead Faculty in the Degree Design Lab and also teaches in the Core Curriculum. He earned a Ph.D. in European Intellectual History from Duke University, with a special interest in Modern Germany and the History of Higher Education. Teaching interdisciplinary inquiry-driven courses at Champlain led him to the importance of integrative learning in developing students who can think broadly and synthetically, and in particular, to the intersection between integrative thinking and learning assessment. Most recently his research and praxis has focused on competency-based education, particularly in a general education context, and on the history of General Education in the United States.
He served as Assistant Dean for Assessment at Champlain for 12 years, and four years as President of the New England Educational Assessment Network. He has also consulted with other institutions on general education and assessment, and has served as an accreditation reviewer for the New England Commission of Higher Education. He has presented often at assessment conferences and at the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies. As chair of the College Competency Committee since 2014, he has facilitated the development of the Champlain College Competencies.
Professional & Scholastic Affiliations
Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing
Watchmen (the novel). Ground breaking in its time, (I read the original comics when they came out in 1986), it holds up exceptionally well. It inverts and explores many of the tropes of superheroes and vigilantism, of conspiracy theories and power. The writing is razor sharp and the images are densely allegorical and intimately interwoven. The HBO miniseries of the same name (2019) is also great, transposing issues of race and policing in ways that again challenge our beliefs about what it means to be a hero. Both are brilliant.
Neal Stephenson’s Anathem is a work of science fiction that renders a richly drawn alternate reality that simultaneously steps through the most interesting thickets of classical Greek philosophy, and mashes it up with quantum mechanics. It is a novel of big ideas wrapped up in adventure, and appeals to everything I love about science fiction.
