May
2006 • The monthly newsletter for UWT faculty and staff
Lower-division
curriculum on track
Continued
from first page
A
week-long faculty development workshop, which Kalikoff jokingly
calls “Core Camp,” is scheduled beginning June 12.
This will be the first opportunity for the 18 faculty who’ll
teach core courses to gather and further develop the core curriculum
together.
“Working
together in a group ensures a coherent trajectory for students’
first-year experience and also that a global perspective, diversity,
civic engagement, critical reasoning and communication skills
will be integrated into courses,” says Kalikoff.
Concerns the curriculum would lack resources needed for environmental
science majors was resolved this week as $23,000 in funding was
identified out of UW Seattle to meet needs. The money was needed
to outfit labs required for the freshmen courses.
When
the deadline to schedule courses in IAS arrived, administrators
were continuing to seek funding to support first-year science
courses.
“Students were asking me if the lower-division courses for
science would be available and at that point I had to say they
were not,” says Cheryl Greengrove, coordinator of the Environmental
Science program.
Students
and staff began voicing concerns and The Ledger, the
student newspaper, ran a story based on those concerns. Greengrove
and Alan Wood, vice chancellor for Academic Affairs, continued
their search, and Wood found a pool of funds in the UW Seattle
Provost’s Office.
“Seattle has been extremely generous to make available some
funding to help us bridge these first few years of offering lower-division
courses,” says Wood. “We are not alone with these
kinds of challenges. Bothell has received similar funding to help
launch freshman curriculum.”
The Environmental Science Program, which recieved a Brotman Award
for educational excellence last year, will offer lower-division
science courses. Freshmen who are interested in environmental
science will have all the requirements they need to graduate in
four years, starting with the first-year biology sequence, physical
geology and assorted math classes. Science will also be integrated
into the 10- and 5-credit core courses.
Core Faculty for 2006-07
Examples
of potential paired disciplines:
- Studio
art and
composition (Autumn)
- Cultural
anthropology and composition (Autumn)
-
Environmental science and
composition (Autumn)
- Economics
and Asian history (Winter)
-
Literature and sociology (Spring)
