Core Values

Champlain College builds a bold new curriculum to take every student to the next intellectual level

By Erik Esckilsen
Photography by Kathleen Landwehrle

It doesn’t take a long memory to appreciate Champlain College’s growth and evolution. A short walk around the campus will do the trick. New state-of-the-art buildings blend harmoniously with the Hill section’s stately old homes -- Champlain’s own Victorian-style dormitories among them -- and with the College’s other structures.

While Champlain’s campus facilities have always been essential to the quality of education that the College provides, their attractive, orderly exteriors -- and the sense of permanence and stability evoked -- have often belied dramatic changes taking place within them. This was certainly the case this fall semester with the launch of the Core curriculum. The bold new approach to general education -- those required (and sometimes dreaded) courses outside students’ majors -- represents the most profound change in the curriculum since the College began offering bachelor’s degrees roughly a decade ago. In its philosophy and design, the Core is unquestionably a course of study like none Champlain has ever seen.

THE PREMISE

“For me, this all began with some thoughts about the word career.” This reflection from Champlain College President David Finney, on the inspiration to revamp the College’s general education curriculum, became linked to a deep consideration of what defines a “career school” in the 21st century. According to Finney, many schools that promote themselves as such are geared more toward preparing students for jobs -- entry-level jobs, most likely -- than toward longer-term careers. The distinction, he says, is that a true career-oriented curriculum extends beyond professional skills training and teaches students to communicate and to think critically and analytically -- the means by which professionals adapt to changes and lead others in today’s dynamic marketplace.

Of course, Champlain College has been educating thinkers and communicators all along, both through its general education curriculum and through its professionally focused courses. As Finney points out, however, “Any curriculum has a life span...and, over time, gets tweaked and tweaked and kind of loses shape.” He was not surprised, then, that soon after he signed on as Champlain’s president in 2004, the faculty approached him to review the general education curriculum. Their goal, as he recalls, was “to crank it up” so that it was as good as the professional programs.

The wheels began turning -- and rapidly, notes Champlain College Provost Robin Abramson, given the urgency in the marketplace for college graduates with broad-based knowledge. “Employers are saying, ‘We can train people to do what we need them to do,’” she says. “‘They have to come to us with all of these general educational skills. We can’t train them to do those things. We don’t have time.’”

THE PROGRAM

Bolstering the College’s effort to educate lifelong learners is the Core division’s main function. In crafting a four-year sequence of courses to fulfill this purpose, the faculty members forming the Core development committee -- David Kite, Robert Mayer, and Jennifer Vincent (see “The Core Dream -- and Team”) -- have merged two approaches. One is fairly traditional: a healthy dose of the liberal arts—specifically, art, economics, history, literature, natural science, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. The other approach is more innovative: interdisciplinary study -- that is, a way of studying course material, in one course, from the perspectives of multiple academic disciplines. The resulting program of study -- 41 credits out of a student’s 120 credits required for graduation -- promises to be highly relevant to, and engaged with, the challenges of 21st-century work and life. Most of the courses are still, to some degree, on the drawing board, but the first-year courses and the general intellectual focus of each year’s academic work are set:

First Year: Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies

Courses orient students to a rigorous academic curriculum while recognizing the personal and social dimensions of the first-year student experience.

• Concepts of Self—an exploration of human identity from the perspectives of art, literature, psychology, and natural science.
• Concepts of Community—an examination of the American community through the lenses of history, philosophy, economics, and sociology.

The integrity of the interdisciplinary approach is reinforced in the critical first academic year by pairing two first-year writing courses, Rhetoric I (fall semester) and Rhetoric II (spring semester), with the Core concepts courses. Students who work together in each writing course will also study together in the Core concepts course, establishing a cohort with shared academic experiences. Finney anticipates that cohorts may benefit students academically as well as socially while enhancing the first-year experience overall. He points to research suggesting that forming attachments is one of the greatest challenges that many new students face. “I do think that the cohort model will allow us to demand more from the students than we have in the past,” he says, adding that the Core’s structure will “allow them to engage more deeply” with their learning.

Second Year: The Western Tradition

In the second year of the Core, students encounter some of the major contributions that Western culture has made to modern life. Four courses make up the sequence, delving into the following topics:

• Art and Aesthetics in the West
• Scientific Revolutions
• Capitalism and Democracy
• Spirituality and Belief

According to Kite, he and his colleagues on the course development committee, with guidance from other faculty members, were careful not to adopt a typical liberal arts approach to studying what he calls “the big Western ideas.” For example, the committee avoided addressing such concepts as art in strictly chronological, historical terms. “We wanted a course that really spoke to the aesthetic dimension of life and didn’t historicize art, that really talked about what artistic, literary, poetic expression is,” Kite says. “We want our students to be able to engage in that profitably and to be open to that kind of thinking and expression.” The result, a course-in-progress titled Art and Aesthetics in the West, will likely involve a hands-on studio component, an idea that Kite credits Professor and Multimedia & Graphic Design Program Director David Lustgarten with bringing to the committee’s consideration. Kite also foresees stimulating intellectual activity growing out of the contrasting academic disciplines explored in the Core’s second-year sequence. He points to a semester’s study of Art and Aesthetics in the West coinciding with a course called Scientific Revolutions. “That’s going to be an interesting pairing,” he says.

Third Year: The Global Experience

Students will focus their intellectual energies on societies and civilizations beyond North America through coursework, cultural-immersion experiences, work with Burlington-area immigrant populations, or international study in such locations as India, Ireland, or Montreal. Students will be able to choose from varied options in developing global awareness during their third-year Core studies. That they embrace this opportunity with vigor has been a hallmark of Finney’s vision for Champlain College since the outset of his tenure. Well-versed in setting up study-abroad sites through other institutions, he considers international study both a potentially “transformative” experience for students and “really central to them being able to perform well in career situations they will face.” Finney is adamant that Champlain help students prepare for life and work in the global village. “My view is that if Champlain doesn’t do something to prepare them to deal with people who have radically different views of the world—not just deal with them but honor and celebrate them as valid alternatives -- then we haven’t done a good job educating them,” he says.

Fourth Year: The Capstone Experience

In their final academic year, students will design, with faculty guidance, a culminating academic experience that the first Core dean, Betsy Beaulieu (see profile below), hopes will be “a thorough integration of the work students have done in their professional field and in the three years of the Core.” That may mean thesis-style writings or more community-based projects. “I envision a variety of experiences, a variety of ways to do that senior year,” Beaulieu says. “And it should provide a really interesting way to synthesize what they have done here.”

THE PROMISE

In essence, the Core curriculum is a liberal arts curriculum, but not according to the traditional definition. Vincent contrasts the Core curriculum with the conventional liberal arts “cafeteria” curriculum. “Instead of students taking Philosophy 101 and Sociology 101 and Economics 101 and leaving it up to students to make connections among those disciplines and understand the bigger implications of those disciplines, how they apply to the real world,” she says, “we’re actually drawing those connections in the classroom ... making a very conscious effort to connect the liberal arts to their professions. We want students to realize who they are, we want them to understand the country and the community they’re living in, and we want them to understand our place in this world, in a global sense. That’s going to make them much better professionals.”

Viewed in that light, the Core curriculum aligns well with Champlain College’s mission to deliver a rigorous, professionally focused education geared toward ever-shifting marketplace demands. “We want to make sure that all elements [of the curriculum], not just the professional but the ‘gen ed’ elements as well, are contemporary and up to date and the highest quality we can possibly make them,” Mayer says. “What we had worked well for a number of years, but times change. ... [The Core] is, in a sense, restating the mission and reinforcing it -- not leaving it behind by any means -- for a new student body, a new economy, and new expectations.”

Abramson embraces that view, adding that, far from being some abstract academic theory, interdisciplinary study is a more accurate simulation of what the world has in store for students. “When people get out into the workplace, they’re going to be dealing with everything at once,” she says. “It’s all happening at the same time.”

Given the brisk rate of change at Champlain College, on campus and in the curriculum, Abramson, her colleagues in the administration, and the Core faculty are uniquely qualified to lead students through a period of profound and pivotal change -- the College experience. For Finney, that mission is nothing short of a mandate for an institution endeavoring to prepare students for success in the 21st century. “If we’re going to be a careeroriented institution, and be serious about it,” he says, “the bar has to be set a lot higher, because career is life.”