Curriculum by Design - by Mary Crane & David Quigley & Andy Boynton

About the Book

Includes Appendix A: "The Vision Animating the Boston College Core Curriculum"; Appendix B: "Boston College Core Curriculum Required Courses" and Appendix C: "Complex Problem and Enduring Question Courses, 2015-2021."

Book Synopsis

This book tells the story of how a team of colleagues at Boston College took an unusual approach (working with a design consultancy) to renewing their core and in the process energized administrators, faculty, and students to view liberal arts education as an ongoing process of innovation. It aims to provide insight into what they did and why they did it and to provide a candid account of what has worked and what has not worked. Although all institutions are different, they believe their experiences can provide guidance to others who want to change their general education curriculum or who are being asked to teach core or general education courses in new ways.

The book also includes short essays by a number of faculty colleagues who have been teaching in BC's new innovative core courses, providing practical advice about the challenges of trying interdisciplinary teaching, team teaching, project-or problem-based learning, intentional reflection, and other new structures and pedagogies for the first time. It will also address some of the nuts and bolts issues they have encountered when trying to create structures to make curriculum change sustainable over time and to foster ongoing innovation.

Review Quotes

General education, the deadly term for introducing students to the varied wonders of academic discovery and learning, may well be a college's most important task. Sadly we often fail, as the political process results in dull compromises. The faculty at Boston College sought a different route to a better outcome, collaborating with a design firm to forge consensus on a truly fresh set of efforts. It's a great and heartening story, told with extraordinary frankness by several lead participants and concluding with several examples of the faculty's trials in trying something authentically new. And what the BC faculty and administration describe should be of crucial interest to every college seeking greater engagement of students with their own education, and with the faculty and the institution itself.---Robert Weisbuch, former President of Drew University

About the Author

Mary Crane (Edited By)
Mary Thomas Crane is the Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English and Director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Boston College. She is the author of books and articles on early modern English literature and culture, including Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory and Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England.

David Quigley (Edited By)
David Quigley has served since 2014 as Provost and Dean of Faculties at Boston College, where he is also Professor of history. Among his scholarly works are Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy and Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777-1877.

Andy Boynton (Edited By)
Andy Boynton is Dean of Boston College's Carroll School of Management. He is the co-author of The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make Them Happen and Virtuoso Teams: Lessons from Teams That Changed Their Worlds.