Curricular innovation in the humanities
Higher Ed is changing—fast—and Humanities are on the front lines of that change. It is not a matter of “if we change” but “how we change” and how we positively envision and manage that change. The Center for Integrated Humanities at Chestnut Hill wants to be a leader—maintaining and protecting what is essential to studies in Humanities’ disciplines while also connecting our disciplines in meaningful and vital ways to the students we serve. Our curricular innovations result from our conversations with our students, with each other, and with other educators in higher ed.
New Interdisciplinary Senior Seminar Experience
Capstone and Bridge. You. Smarter.
Integrated Humanities’ new Senior Seminar experience combines a capstone academic research project in your discipline with an applied sequence that prepares you for whatever is next! Senior Seminar serves as the culminating experience of your years of undergraduate study. You demonstrate the skills you have acquired around a topic you find fascinating. You also reflect upon your education at CHC and plan for your next steps.
How it Works
CAPSTONE
Fall- The Research Semester
The research workshop is a vibrant, interdisciplinary classroom experience that will bring together students majoring in other areas of the Humanities, including English, French, History, Music, and Spanish. In the workshop, you explore, design, research, and draft your senior seminar research paper. The workshop is an interactive class designed to give you space to share and critique ideas around a common theme as you develop and execute an integrated research project.
In the Senior Seminar Advisory, you and the other students in your major will work closely with a faculty mentor in your major department, who will provide disciplinary guidance, including appropriate primary and secondary readings, and discussions of theoretical or disciplinary questions that might inform your work.
Together the workshop and advisory provide a dynamic capstone experience that highlights and expands your critical and creative thinking, listening, and public speaking skills.
Spring- The Applied Semester
In the Applied Senior Seminar workshop, you transform your research into two projects in a dynamic team setting: (1) you revise your paper into a polished piece of academic writing, and (2) you re-package your academic argument for a popular audience. You decide on the genre: magazine article, TED talk, podcast, video essay, a performance or senior recital—it’s up to you! However, the key point is that you recast your work for a popular audience in a different media format.
To round out your Applied Senior Seminar experience, you enroll in one of our new Humanities-at-work bridge courses.
BRIDGE
These 1-credit P/F seminars for academic credit (that means they count toward graduation) are designed to help students who major in fields in the Integrated Humanities (Media & Communication, English, Foreign Language & Literature, History, and Music) prepare for what’s next. These courses offer you an opportunity to reflect on your education (knowledge and skills gained) so that you can purposefully transition into the world of work or graduate school. You will learn how to connect your course work and educational experience at CHC to the jobs you want and the person you would like to become.
New interdisciplinary Minors
Health Humanities
The Health Humanities minor offers students who are preparing to work in health-related or service-related fields (medicine, exercise science, human services, criminal justice, psychology, etc.) a competitive edge by offering them coursework that recognizes and acknowledges the fact that they will work with human beings. This interdisciplinary minor is composed of courses that develop personal and professional skills that will make students more effective when interacting with patients and clients. The courses focus on understanding stories and narration, honing listening skills, developing and managing empathy, appreciating the complexity of ethical issues, and understanding the importance of social and cultural contexts when delivering care or services.
Sample courses:
ENGL 281: Literature and Medicine
BIOL 215: Biological and Medical Ethics
ENGL 241: Gender and Literature
HLTH 102: Introduction to Healthcare
PSCI 245: The Politics of Global Public HealthPHIL 281: Wellbeing: Philosophical, Psychological, and Public Health Perspectives
PSCI 245: The Politics of Global Public Health
PSYCH 240: Psychology of Health, Stress, and Coping
RLST 218: Biomedical Moral Issues
RLST 266 The Meaning of Death and Dying
SOCI 114 Social Gerontology
SOCI 216: Sociology of Health and Medicine
SPAN 101 & 102: Spanish for the Health Professions
Environmental Studies
The purpose of the minor is to prepare students to be, in the words of Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si!, “ecological citizens” of the earth. Although the minor may open students to exciting new career possibilities within or conjoined with their majors, the intellectual purpose is foremost to engender crucial ways of “re-thinking” the place of the human within “all of creation,” a goal indicated in the CHC Mission Statement. As Francis points out (and emerging programs throughout the country illustrate ): “Environmental education” has broadened “beyond a focus on scientific information alone, to include a critique of the myths of modernity” that have disrupted our “ecological equilibrium” (namely: a distorting sense of anthropocentrism, a materialist view of everything in nature as constituting human property, and an economic principle of “limitless growth” which ignores negative impacts on the environment and on vulnerable, members of creation.)
Sample courses:
BIO 106 Ecology and Environmental Issues (*labs if needed will not count toward the minor)
BIO 125: Ponds and Streams*
BIO 145: Forests and Fields*
ECON 109: Environmental Economics
ENGL 277: Ecology and Literature
ENGL 2** Connected Creatures: Animals and Humans in Literature (pending approval; taught fall 2020 as ENGL 281)
HIST 2** Environmental History of the U.S. (pending approval, taught fall 2020 as HIST 281)
PHIL 224: Ethics and the Environment
RLST 219: A God Beyond All Names
RLST 240: Introduction to Social Justice
RLST 244: Global Theology
SOCI 211: Environmental Law
ENVST*411 Internship in Environmental Studies