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Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities
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Scripps College has a long and distinguished tradition in teaching in the humanities. New students must fulfill their general education requirement in the Humanities by taking the Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Core). The Core is a closely integrated sequence of three courses designed to encourage increasingly sophisticated and focused interdisciplinary investigation of a broad range of historical and contemporary issues.
During the first semester, all first-year students take Core I which consists of a lecture/discussion format. Team-taught by 15-18 faculty members drawn from each of the College’s academic divisions (arts, letters, natural sciences, and social sciences). Core I is unified by a single syllabus and a particular focus that is approached from multiple perspectives. In the second semester of the first year, students choose from a range of Core II courses, each of which is taught by an individual professor or team-taught with two professors. Core II courses are devoted to more intensive study of some of the methods, issues, and problems introduced in Core I. In the first semester of the sophomore year, students continue their interdisciplinary work in Core III, in which they choose from a large number of options which focus on more specialized topics and in which students develop independent research and projects; each Core III course is taught by an individual professor.
The theme of the Core Program as a whole is “Histories of the Present”. With this inquiry Core faculty and students explore the ways in which our contemporary self-understandings emerge from and express commitments and categories that are often taken as given—as so “natural” and “obvious” that they prevent us from thinking clearly about their complexities and ambiguities, and hinder us from seeing our world in other ways.
Core Curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities
Core I: Histories of the Present: Violence
Core I takes up this task through an examination of the ways in which violence has been conceptualized and represented historically. The problems and issues we explore (for example, the relationship between political organization and state violence, or the role of literature in pointing to limits that define and enable dominant ways of thinking) involve values and categories such as law and justice, humanitarian intervention, gender and sexual difference, “race”, universalism, cultural affiliation, and individualism.
These ideas play a central role in shaping our present world and figure prominently in apparently intractable debates about the world—whether we define that world in indigenous, local, national, or global terms. More often than not, these debates cannot be resolved through recourse to correct or incorrect understandings of what we assume to be “self-evident.” What Core I seeks to provide, in relation to such debates, is the vantage point of critical distance: the opportunity to think about and critique self-reflexively the consequences of the very things we take for granted.
The approach is two-fold: historical and textual. History is invoked as a capacity for critical self-understanding. The origins of what we take to be self-evident categories are explored but so too are other ways of thinking about violence in its social, political, and cultural dimensions that were marginalized or subject to institutional forgetting. The second approach of the course is textual. To the extent that key categories and practices are a matter for contestation, they require a focus on interpretation: to understand how values and categories posed as true and natural were constructed in debates and urgent political contests.
Core II: Histories of the Present
Core II continues—with sharper focus and through an array of course offerings—the interdisciplinary investigations begun in Core I. That is, we develop our examination of the ways in which our contemporary self-understandings (political, moral, economic, aesthetic, etc.) emerge from and express commitments and categories that are often regarded as given—so “natural” and “obvious” as to prevent us from thinking clearly about their complexities and ambiguities. Core II courses are taught by a faculty member with interdisciplinary research interests and may be team-taught by faculty whose complementary research interests make for fresh interdisciplinary dialogue. Consult the Scripps Portal for CORE II offerings for the current semester. Core II offerings vary each year and may include:
The Arts and Literature of Zen Buddhism
Becoming Someone Else in American Culture
Constructions of (Dis)Ability
Death
Decolonize: First Nations Musics and Literatures
Desire and Decadence: Interdisciplinary Contexts in Fin-de-Siecle Europe
Eat the Rich! Capitalism and Work
Ecological Justice
Feminisms and Anti/Nonviolence
Lights, Camera, Murder! Crimes and Trials in France and the U.S
Misrepresenting Women
The Nature of “Nature.”
Old New Media
The Question of the Animal, Ancient and Contemporary
Riotous Americans: Los Angeles and the Poetics of Unrest
The Self and the Origins of the State in the Western World
Shakespeare and Selfhood
Terms of Modernity
Tragedy and National Narratives
Travel, Encounter, and the History of Religion
Urban Nights: Gender, Work, and Experiences
What is Avant-Garde?
Why Punish?
Core III: Histories of the Present
Core III courses are small seminars designed to foster innovation and collaboration among students and faculty. The seminars involve considerable student participation and afford the opportunity to do more individualized, self-directed scholarship in association with a single faculty member working in the area of expertise from an interdisciplinary perspective. The work of the seminars culminates in a self-designed project exploring a particular topic through the lens of “histories of the present.” Exceptional student work will be disseminated to the wider College community. Depending on instructor and subject matter, the Core III seminars involve research, internships with fieldwork, exhibits, performances, conferences, and multimedia projects. Consult the Scripps Portal for Core III offerings for the current semester. Core III course offerings vary each year and may include:
Animal Rights and Speciesism
The Artist Book as an Agent of Social Change
Biblical Fictions and the Religious Imagination
Blues Jazzlines: Past and Present Tense
Challenges from the global south - “America”
Collective Songwriting: Theory and Knowledge Production
Creating and Recreating Genji
Cyberculture and the Posthuman Age
The Detective in the City
Discord and Dialog
Ecological Justice
Education and Inequality
Encountering the Middle East: Representations of Race, Gender, and Violence
Fame & Happiness: French Women as Case Study
Foreign Language and Culture Teaching Clinic
History and Memory
The Life Story
Mathematics in Our Culture
The Mechanical Eye: Photography from Science to Art
Mobilizing Art: Creating Activist Performances
Realism and Anti-Realism
Regarding the Pain of Others: Ethics and Documentary Representation
Sites of Seduction: Aesthetic Contexts of the French Garden and its Others
Snapshots, Portraits, Instagram
Southern California and Hollywood Film: Human Dreams, Human Difference and Human Desire
The Twentieth-Century Music Schism
United: Women’s Work and Collective Action
What is Happiness?
Women, Girls, and Mathematical Superstitions
Virgins and Goddesses
Learning Outcomes of the Program in Core 1
Department Goals and/or Objectives
Goals are broad statements that describe what the program wants to accomplish
1. First-semester students have a shared intellectual experience.
2. Students are introduced to interdisciplinary approaches to studying problems of historical and contemporary interest.
3. Students develop analytical skills in reading and oral expression through small-group discussions.
4. Students develop writing skills that emphasize argumentation and textual analysis.
Student Learning Outcomes
Outcomes describe specific knowledge, abilities, values, and attitudes students should demonstrate
SLO1: Students demonstrate comprehension of key terms from texts and lectures.
SLO2: Students are able to examine a variety of issues from different disciplinary perspectives.
SLO3: Students display a comprehension of course materials (i.e., the claims, arguments, interpretations of texts and lectures).
SLO4: Students display a capacity to present and to respond to claims and arguments orally.
SLO5: Student essays emphasize argumentation and textual analysis.
Learning Outcomes of the Program in Core 2
Department Goals and/or Objectives
Goals are broad statements that describe what the program wants to accomplish
1. Understand how and why different disciplines approach seemingly similar objects of contemporary interest and/or historical importance from different perspectives, leading to different conclusions and material consequences.
2. Use various disciplinary methods.
3. Develop their own written and oral arguments in interdisciplinary contexts.
Student Learning Outcomes
Outcomes describe specific knowledge, abilities, values, and attitudes students should demonstrate
SLO1: Demonstrate knowledge of various disciplinary methods.
SLO2: Effectively communicate arguments orally.
SLO3: Effectively present arguments in written form.
Learning Outcomes of the Program in Core 3
Department Goals and/or Objectives
Goals are broad statements that describe what the program wants to accomplish
1. Students independently and creatively will develop their understanding of different disciplines and interdisciplinary inquiry acquired in Core 1 and 2.
2. Students explore and interrogate the historical construction of a particular field of inquiry.
3. Students formulate, research, and execute a substantial project of their own design.
Student Learning Outcomes
Outcomes describe specific knowledge, abilities, values, and attitudes students should demonstrate
SLO1: Student synthesizes and critically explains issues.
SLO2: Student articulates a clear and informed argument.
Programs
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