Academic Program

Goucher College has always taken an expansive perspective on education, helping and encouraging students not only to explore their intellectual interests and passions, but also to understand why their education is important and how they can use it for good in the world.

We have always been ahead of the pack in connecting classroom learning to real-world experience, particularly through internships, service-learning programs, and collaborative faculty-student research. In recent years, we have developed some truly innovative ways of enhancing our students’ academic careers with international experiences-even for students whose majors traditionally have not included a strong international component.

Building on these traditions and triumphs, we will develop an academic program that is exceptionally strong in and of itself, and strengthened further by more-and more powerful-connections between our curriculum and the opportunities we provide for real experience out in the world. With the college’s long-held interdisciplinary philosophy of education as our inspiration and guide, we will use the combined power of our curriculum and our experiential learning programs to demonstrate not only how every discipline connects to every other, but also how every one of them comes into play every day, throughout the globe, in all of the human struggles and advances that define our lives.

Over the past year, a Curriculum Transformation Group comprising faculty from every academic division has worked to develop strategies by which we might reshape and revitalize our curriculum to achieve these goals. We believe the initiatives they have recommended are a blueprint for an academic program that truly distinguishes Goucher College among liberal arts colleges, that will help us attract the highest caliber of student and faculty scholars, and that establishes Goucher as a leader in providing higher education with a global scope.

The faculty of Goucher College approved these recommendations unanimously in May 2003. We will:

1. Restructure our academic program to support better the innovative ways in which we connect learning to firsthand experience in the world beyond Goucher College.

One of the most distinctive and attractive features of Goucher College’s academic program is the array of opportunities we provide our students to put their learning into action in real-world situations, often in ways that students at other institutions do not experience as undergraduates. Our science students, for example, collaborate with professors on research projects of great consequence. Students in the arts, through special grants, travel to create new work in innovative individual projects. Our dance students work with renowned ballet and modern guest choreographers from prestigious companies such as the American Ballet Theatre and José Limón. Through service-learning programs and internships, many students experience the ways in which their knowledge, ideas, experience, and skills can make a difference in the community and on the job every day.

We have also blazed some truly important and impressive new trails in international education in recent years, particularly through our three-week intensive courses. During winter and summer breaks, our students set off for points all over the globe to study the culture and arts of Ghana, the marine biology of Honduras, and inequality and social policy in South Africa. They travel to Prague to study the history and literature of Central Europe, and to Havana to explore culture and business in Cuba. They go to Greece to study drama and to England to study theatre and dance; to Avignon, Cuernavaca, and Berlin for intensive study of French, Spanish, and German. Soon, they will also be going to Brazil to study dance, to Romania to explore the art and science of glass, to India to investigate the cultural and economic impact of globalization on Third World societies, and to Spain to study astronomy.

All of these programs give students a taste of life in other cultures and in communities very different from their own. They give students a chance to explore parts of the world and aspects of their education that they would probably not be able to commit to over a traditional academic semester. And the transformative effect they have on the students who participate in them is nothing short of stunning. Many go on to complement their coursework with other international study programs and projects throughout their academic careers; for some, the experience inspires whole new directions in their lives. Equally important, we have found that these opportunities are very exciting and attractive to prospective students.

To support further innovations in experiential learning, we will expand our academic calendar, creating a permanent space in the academic year for intensive programs like these. Our academic year will be composed of four terms, including two full semesters and two three-week terms, one in January and one in May/June. We will take full advantage of the opportunity this will provide us to offer an even wider variety of intensive-learning options in all disciplines. Furthermore, we are committed to providing at least one intensive international experience to every student who seeks it, with no additional financial burden.

2. Strengthen our academic program at every level and in every discipline to support our goals of broadening our international perspective and connecting learning across disciplines.

The high-profile experiential-learning programs we offer are unquestionably important opportunities for our students, and they are a crucial part of the kind of programming we want to deliver. They must be supported by a curriculum that provides a solid basis in terms of both the foundational knowledge students need to succeed in these courses and the institutional values our courses convey.

We are already in the process of revising the general education curriculum at Goucher to integrate and articulate better the key concepts, skills, and proficiencies we want our students to learn and assimilate during their time here. Viewing the general education curriculum as a whole, we will ensure that the global perspective and dedication to experience, service, and citizenship that distinguish Goucher as an institution are reflected and reinforced in meaningful ways throughout our students’ academic careers.

We will also create a more flexible academic system to accommodate more variety in our course structures. The kinds of experiences we want to offer our students do not always fit easily into the conventional academic day or week, or sometimes even semester. Rather than try to force them, we will explore some unconventional ways of looking at the academic day, week, and semester. This will allow us to link courses to each other, and to co-curricular experiences, in ways that we have not done before.

We will be able, for example, to incorporate laboratory experience and service-learning components into four-credit courses, and to offer six-credit courses that span three terms to offer a more comprehensive view of the topics they cover. Rather than studying, say, the effects of pollution on the Chesapeake Bay in a biology class, and then taking a completely separate class later on the literature of the region-and possibly missing some of the subtle connections between them-students will have the option of enrolling in them as a course cluster that draws those connections more explicitly. Other course clusters may connect students taking courses in two different disciplines-mathematics and sociology, for example-by bringing them together regularly in a one-credit additional unit to work on a project that draws on the knowledge and skills they learn in both. Still others may pair regular, semester-long courses with related three-week intensive programs.

3. Improve the means by which we introduce new students to Goucher College-and support them as they make the transition to college life.

The impression we make on students during their first year at Goucher is critical. Quite often, the kind of experience a student has during his or her first year on campus determines whether or not he or she will stay. Retention has been improving, but we must ensure that our first-year programs introduce students to Goucher in a way that clearly illustrates the boundless possibilities that await them throughout their academic careers-and the support we will give them along the way.

Many of these programs are already in place. Our Connections seminars introduce students to the values, ideals, and expectations of our educational community and address common first-year concerns, such as time management, major selection, and the like. In Frontiers, first-year students get a taste of the range of our academic program through a series of seminar-style classes designed to cut across disciplinary boundaries-courses like Frontiers in Drug Development: The Search for a Magic Bullet; Them Bellyful but We Hungry: Third World Music and History, and the North-South Frontier; and Finding the Sacred in the Everyday.

For the past several years, we have enjoyed great success with a summer-reading program in which all incoming students read the same book and then discuss it in groups with faculty, staff, and other students when they arrive for Orientation. In most cases, the author of the reading selection joins us on campus to read from his or her work and participate in the discussions. Last year’s selection was No Foreigners Beyond this Point, a new work by the Tony Award-winning playwright Warren Leight about his experiences teaching English in China. So impressed was Mr. Leight with the insights of the students with whom he spoke that he revised the play to include some of their perspectives before it opened later that year at Baltimore’s Center Stage. This year’s selection, Year of Wonders, was chosen because of the relevance of its story, about a 17th-century English village afflicted by plague, to recent global events. Its author, Geraldine Brooks, joined us to discuss what the book has to say about the challenges our world faces today.

Now we will work to ensure that these experiences are much more of a piece-and to use some of the other innovations we are developing within the curriculum to expand them even further. The new January term, for example, offers a perfect opportunity to introduce students to service learning, study abroad, and internships through an intensive first-year survey of these programs. Furthermore, we recognize that first-year students face different concerns from those of their counterparts in later class years, and we will develop a more effective advising system designed to address their needs.

4. Increase the size, strength, and diversity of our faculty.

Our faculty is the greatest and most important resource we have at Goucher College. Collectively, its members represent not only the broad and multifaceted body of knowledge that we may pass on to our students, but also the primary means by which we communicate our institutional ideals, values, and objectives. If we are to attain the objectives we have set forth for Goucher College, we must continue to maintain and develop an extraordinary faculty to support them. We must ensure that it is large and strong enough to meet the needs and demands of a larger and stronger academic program and student body. And we must cultivate diversity within it to reflect a full range of perspectives in the discourse in which we engage.

We have made great strides in these areas even in just the past year, appointing outstanding junior faculty members to tenure-track positions in our biology, chemistry, English, French, history, political science, psychology, and Spanish departments. We will continue to build on the advances we have made-and ensure that our faculty and staff represent the widest possible variety of cultures, backgrounds, and points of view-by actively targeting previously underrepresented groups in our recruiting efforts. Furthermore, one of the goals of the capital campaign we will undertake to support the realization of our strategic vision will be to endow new faculty positions, enabling us to hire still more outstanding scholars and teachers in mid-career and at the senior level, as well as bringing leaders in their fields to campus for a year or two as visiting faculty.

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