Integrating the Curriculum

The courses being given at any moment in a single department represent any number of rich potential conversations within a discipline and across the disciplines. But since students experience these conversations only as a series of monologues, the conversations become actual only for the minority who can reconstruct them on their own.

--Gerald Graff in Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalized American Education (1992)

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Two students had something very similar to say about their undergraduate experience at Penn.

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Electronic text creates not only a new writing space but a new educational space as well. Not only the humanities curriculum, but school and university structures, administrative and physical, are affected at every point, as of course is the whole cultural repository and information system we call a library. In the university world, it is disciplinarity and its departmental shadow--as intellectual but not necessarily bureaucratic and budgetary entities--that will be most transformed. The electronic revolution can transform the entire educational and academic conceptualization of a complex, decentralized university like Penn--unleashing huge amounts of collaborative intellectual energy--without the immediate need for radically altering the tradition of "local" institutional autonomy among and within the Schools.
(Adapted from Richard Lanham.)

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Document URL: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/integrate-curr.html
Last modified: Tuesday, 27-Jul-2004 17:03:20 EDT