Mars Hill College (Mars Hill, NC)
Thematic
Courses in Liberal Arts in Action
Summary
The framework for the new core curriculum revolves around a series of
four interdisciplinary courses, which are thematic in approach. The four
themes are Character, Faith and Reason, Civic Life, and Creativity. The
name of the new core is the Commons, and the name for the new general
education curriculum as a whole is Liberal Arts in Action.
The Practice
Of the four thematic courses in the Liberal Arts in Action core, two courses
were chosen, Character and Civic Life, to help students understand the
role of the individual in community by looking at both the individual
character issues, and the larger civic issues that emerge when one engages
with the community. The intended learning outcomes for students in the
Character course were to have students learn the basic concepts of character
development (what makes a good person?) as examined through various disciplines
and across cultures, and to analyze and apply these concepts to their
own life experiences in community settings. The intended learning outcomes
for students in the Civic Life course were to have students learn the
basic concepts of civic development (what makes a good community?) in
the same interdisciplinary and cross-cultural way, and to also analyze
and apply these concepts to their own life experiences in community settings.
The intended change in faculty knowledge and understanding was to help
faculty learn how to weave experiential components into a curriculum that
had historically been taught through very traditional text-based approaches.
We wanted faculty to develop relationships with community partners in
order to understand ways community partners analyze and apply concepts
of character and civic life in their day-to-day work.
In order to reach this goal, we set up a series of six workshops involving
our faculty design teams and sets of community partners who work with
our students in areas of at-risk youth, affordable housing, and environmental
protection. In preparation for these workshops, we asked the community
partners to look at the goals of the courses and to prepare some case
studies of how they see individual character issues and broader civic
life issues emerging in their work. We also asked them to describe how
they could envision student experiences at their organizations raising
these kinds of issues.
Effectiveness
One of the most important changes that occurred was that faculty members
really did appreciate the depth of understanding that community voices
brought to these workshops; the case studies demonstrated the kind of
complexity that faculty want students to deal with in these two courses.
The other major change involved the inclusion of experiential components
in each of the two courses.
In the Character course, the experiential component is called “Your
Life As Text” where another positive change in faculty knowledge
came after the first semester the course was taught. The faculty realized
there was too much time devoted in the course to traditional texts, and
they revised the course to give more attention to the service-learning
component. They also realized service-learning cannot be an add-on; it
has to be fully integrated into a course and dealt with as seriously as
a traditional text if it is going to produce the desired outcomes. The
evidence for these changes came through the course evaluations and the
subsequent course revision meetings that the faculty design team had.
In the Civic Life course the experiential component is called the “Personal
Case Study.” Course evaluations and faculty interviews demonstrate
evidence that this approach was highly successful in getting students
to make the connections between their own lives in community and the issues
raised throughout the course.
Resources
To see the basic description of the Commons core in the LAA curriculum,
view the Character and Civic Life course descriptions on the MHC website.
To see the variety of service opportunities students can choose from
when fulfilling the experiential requirements of these courses, visit
the LifeWorks website.
(Click on “service-learning database.”)
Contact Information
Stan Dotson
Dean
LifeWorks Learning Partnership
Mars Hill College
PO Box 6677
Mars Hill, NC 28764
Phone: 828-689-1161
sdotson@mhc.edu
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Effective
Practices Exchange
