COR 120 Work in Progress

Work in Progress: Concepts of Community (COR 120)

The CDT felt it would be good to give everyone in the division a heads up as to where we stand with the next Core sequence concepts course.

The team, Jen Vincent, David Kite, Bob Mayer, working very closely with Cinse Bonino for instructional development and assignment planning, has mapped out the general questions, specific texts, and overall flow we want for spring. While the details (ah, the details!) remain as always devilish, you can expect essentially three modules dealing with the origin/definition, structure/functioning, and interrelationships of American communities, four major texts with elements from a fifth, a Global Module, and a major research-oriented paper.

The team is refining the language for the three questions, but the gist of it is:

What is a community?
How do communities function?
Why and how do communities interact?

The final list of texts is as follows:

Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer
Republic, by Plato (trans. C.D.C. Reeve)
Teachings From the Worldly Philosophy, by Robert Heilbroner
The Virtual Self, by Ben Agger
and selections from Bowling Alone, by Robert D. Putnam

The goal of the course is to get students inquiring into history, philosophy, sociology, and economics as they pursue questions surrounding the origins, composition, and interaction of American communities.

The structure of the course will be somewhat looser than COR 110, in that faculty will be tasked with coming up with more examples fitting the basic instructional parameters this time, rather than having the lion’s share predetermined. One goal is to have faculty create relevant entry points into each module, using each faculty member’s area of personal expertise and interest.

The research paper, coupled with a group project, will drive the information literacy goals for the course, and will build on material developed by the students during the semester. COR 120 will push students rather deeply into developing their research and information literacy skills.

The Global Module, which can begin at any time from about week four through week eight, depending on overseas partners, will focus on one of several themes; instructors may not have a choice of what themes they work with due to the vagaries of setting up international connections but all the module themes will be quite easily integrated into the COR 120 coursework. Gary Scudder is lining up partners in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, and with luck Asia as well. Certainly a goal is to have as much instructor choice here as is feasible, and even when the module theme is predetermined, the way it is integrated will be largely up to the instructor, as long as certain basic parameters are met.

The team will be designing another two required institutional assessment assignments for the ePort; as before, the ePort will be available for more instructor-defined uses as well.