Exploration and Discovery

The College’s first-year core program, Exploration and Discovery, described recently in the Lewis & Clark Chronicle, is now halfway through its third year of implementation. By every measure the program has been a success, with strong faculty support from those teaching in E&D as well as from those not currently participating. Most every academic department is contributing faculty members to the program, and those that have not as yet contributed are slated to do so in the next year or two.

The faculty found their students to have significantly improved in their writing, critical thinking, careful reading, and speaking (discussion) skills, and to have found the course to be engaging. These impressions are clearly borne out by the course evaluations, which show a majority of students viewing their skills as having improved. The majority of students also expressly praise the fall course—quite an accomplishment for a required, first-year class. The fall semester was also invigorated by a special lecture by the renowned political columnist Katha Pollitt.
The 2009 faculty will be convened next month to determine the fall slate of books, once again demonstrating the real vitality and evolutionary basis of E&D: they will stamp their own mark on the common slate, ensuring that those works are ones they find to be the most teachable and most valuable, and that this band of faculty is invested in those selected works and in the course as a whole.

Enthusiasm & Expertise...

The E&D faculty brings wonderful enthusiasm and expertise to their individual, and very individualized, sections for the spring (where every section is distinctive as well as being interdisciplinary and historically broad). The spring has proved the perfect complement to the fall and its common, “great books” paradigm, offering faculty a way of “moonlighting” in areas—and between disciplines—outside their departments. It has proved to be an exciting opportunity for faculty. One member says his spring course is what he was born to teach, and that he intends to teach it until he’s carried away (!). Students also find the spring to be a fresh and exciting next step, one that follows from the fall course, to be sure, but that opens up more specificity and many more choices. Students continue to find the options to be exciting, and seem almost to forget that these sections are still part of a required yearlong sequence.
In short, E&D is strong. Students continue to find the course to be appropriate and effective—even ideally so—and the faculty continues to be enthusiastic. E&D is teaching what a core program should—writing, critical thinking, and other skills—and garnering very positive results. It is also providing first-year students with a valuable common experience, which includes a “micro-culture” of shared works in the fall—works students continue to refer to and to employ as touchstones in the spring semester and beyond. Given the levels of enthusiasm and the overall success of the program, Exploration and Discovery is likely to continue as the College’s “flagship” first-year program for many years to come. Its success is the result of faculty commitment, enthusiasm, and hard work.