Good Things
Pilot Curriculum Experiments with Freedom and Responsibility

College dean Rick Beeman has a habit of making pronouncements that sound more like professions of faith than official utterances. "I am an agnostic on the subject of what curricular structure is the best structure for the liberal arts education in the twenty-first century," he says, "but I really believe that once people see the kinds of courses we are going to be offering and the kinds of people involved in them, it will be very difficult for anybody to say anything but, ‘These are good things to be doing.’"

Beeman is talking about the new pilot curriculum, which will be launched in the fall. The curricular innovations, approved by SAS faculty in December, will replace the existing requirements for 200 members of the College class of 2004. Participants will be selected randomly from volunteers among incoming freshmen who accept the invitation to be involved in what has been called an experiment.

Under the plan, SAS will run two undergraduate curricula simultaneously—the current one as well as the pilot—for the next five years. During that period, faculty will test and consider various educational innovations before establishing the most successful initiatives as part of a new curriculum for all undergraduates. The merit of this approach, notes math professor Frank Warner, is that faculty can make choices based on "some real evidence," nudging curriculum reform, which he describes as part science and part art, nearer to the scientific end of the continuum. Warner is chair of the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE), which spearheaded the pilot’s development.

The new curriculum has four main components: a skills and methods requirement comparable to the present curriculum’s with an added emphasis on improving oral communication skills, a significant research project in the major, a condensed configuration of general requirements, and increased space in students’ baccalaureate programs to use electives to shape an individualized course of study that fits their interests.

Building on past efforts in SAS, pilot participants will have a "significant opportunity" to conduct a research, scholarship, or creative project in their major. Academic departments and interdisciplinary programs will be responsible for devising suitable venues for these projects in which majors can learn firsthand how to advance the boundaries of knowledge. "That’s one of the things that’s special about Penn," says Warner. "We’re a research university, not just a liberal arts college. One reason to come to a place like Penn is to be able to have research be part of the undergraduate curriculum."

One of the buzzwords these days in American higher education, Beeman adds, is "problem-oriented learning." Carrying out a research project extends and deepens the educational experience by allowing students to use the theory derived from reading and lectures to solve problems. "It is in research that one integrates theory and practice," he says. "Research really makes it all come alive, and students find it enormously satisfying."

Besides research, an important innovation of the pilot curriculum is a reconfiguration of general education. Under the current general requirement, students take a prescribed distribution of ten courses over seven sectors: society, history and tradition, arts and letters, formal reasoning and analysis, the living world, the physical world, and science studies. In part, the distribution attempts to introduce undergraduates to the "most important bodies of knowledge."

The pilot’s general requirement consists of only four courses, which must be taken during the first four semesters. These special general-education courses, which faculty are now developing, will reduce the current general requirement from 10 narrowly focused, essentially discipline-specific courses to four broader, interdisciplinary ones. Students will take one course from each of four categories: structure and value in human societies; science, culture, and society; earth, space, and life; and imagination, representation, and reality. Classes will be taught by teams of faculty, who will participate in the lectures as well as the discussion sections, guaranteeing that students build what Beeman calls "a meaningful connection with their instructors."

The new courses will approach specific topics through a number of disciplines in the humanities and the social and natural sciences, often highlighting conflicts among cultural or disciplinary perspectives. "Discussions of undergraduate education provide one of the relatively few opportunities for faculty to get together for wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversation," notes Beeman. "At a time when disciplines and work within disciplines tend to get ever more specialized, we really are encouraging discussions across disciplines as faculty create these team-taught courses—and that is such a useful thing for the intellectual health of this institution."

Curriculum reform carries widespread benefits across the University, with salutary effects for faculty as well as undergraduates. The last major revision of the College’s degree requirements took place 13 years ago. Despite a high degree of student satisfaction and unprecedented gains in the quantity and quality of applicants to the College, Warner believes it’s important to revisit the curriculum periodically. "It’s a good idea to take a fresh look at other ways of doing things," he says. "It just keeps the faculty fresh—the whole curriculum fresh."

A chief objective of the abbreviated general requirement is to free students to use electives to pursue their own intellectual interests. Beeman summarizes it this way: "The general requirement is designed to awaken students’ minds and interests to then go on and formulate their own plans for how they want either to broaden or deepen their education. I think the pilot curriculum is probably more ambitious in its desire to inspire students to think for themselves about their education, but it is less ambitious about dictating what the important bodies of knowledge are."

Penn undergrads often put together customized and demanding educational programs, such as interdisciplinary or multiple majors, dual degree programs, semester abroad programs, thematic course clusters and minors, special independent study projects, and others. Some take advantage of the nine professional schools on campus to incorporate vocational training into their liberal arts study. This intellectual independence and creativity in exploiting the wealth of the curriculum is part of Penn’s institutional personality. "One of CUE’s main goals," says Warner, "was to free students to do more of those things."

As the College feels its way toward reform over the next five years, standards for making judgments about the pilot will be developed by CUE. "I would like to see a higher rate of ambition and coherence—but not in any one template," Beeman declares. As elements of the pilot are deemed successful, they may be incorporated into the existing curriculum before the end of the experimental period.

The College has also embarked on a fundamental restructuring of the advising system, and a new structure will be in place for all students by September 2000. Participants in the pilot curriculum will be required to prepare a plan for how they will use their electives, which will be reviewed by a faculty advisor in sophomore year and updated and reviewed again in junior year. "The new advising system," says Beeman, "will emphasize a student’s own responsibility for planning self-consciously their four years here and will provide unambiguous points of contact with intellectual mentors who will help them. That is exactly what we’re trying to accomplish in the pilot curriculum: to bring about a heightened self-consciousness about what an extraordinary gift and opportunity students have during these four years here."

Despite his agnosticism, no one can say anything but, "The dean of the College is a believer."