Reforming core education in the Clark Honors College: Scaffolding liberal arts understanding in freshman and sophomore honors students

The Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon teaches a liberal arts curriculum within the broader research university. During our external review, we realized that our core education curriculum needed rebalancing to reflect student needs and the new capacity for greater breadth enabled by a change to the faculty business model. Our existing curriculum is strong in reading, writing, discussion, research, and critical thinking, but needs better articulated learning goals and sequencing to scaffold student learning. We also realized that students would benefit from greater flexibility, as transfer students and those interested in study abroad found our current offerings difficult to accommodate. Our efforts focused on the first two years of the curriculum, identified through conversations with students and faculty as the area with the greatest need for improvement. Our existing lower-division structure requires 2-course, temporally-constrained (pre- and post-1500), 200-level sequences in literature and history, one 200-level course in natural science, and a research term in history or literature that requires students to engage with a small-scale, quarter-long research project. Our proposal will begin the students' core education with an introduction to the liberal arts that places students on an interdisciplinary foundation from the start, with an emphasis on the process of inquiry and critical thinking. This course will be followed by 3 200-level courses, one each in humanities, social science, and natural science, and then a 300-level research term that builds on the students' learning about inquiry, writing, and thinking to get them to pursue more rigorous projects in an area close to their major discipline. Along with the articulation of learning goals, this overhaul of the curriculum will better build students' learning toward their junior and senior years, when they will undertake upper division coursework across the disciplines and tackle their senior thesis projects.