Bridging the Gap Between the Humanities and Sciences: An Exemplary Education Model of Core Text, Humanistic Education

FAIN: ED-50012-03

Association for Core Texts and Courses (Moraga, CA 94575-2715)
J. Scott Lee (Project Director: October 2002 to December 2006)

Funding details:
Original grant (2003) $229,000.00
Supplement (2004) $15,000.00

A three-year sequence of intensive seminars leading to the development of courses that integrate the sciences and the humanities within the general education curricula of seven participating institutions.

"Bridging the Gap" will build a consortial network of institutions redesigning liberal education, humanistic core text courses to incorporate and reflect upon the sciences and their relation to humanities. "Bridging" will be an ACTC demonstration-and-dissemination, faculty-and-curriculum development project. Using a FIPSE/Mellon general education curriculum longitudinal study of 66 colleges and universities, "Trends in the Liberal Arts Core," and a rich variety of ACTC's institutional general, liberal education core-text models, ACTC will bring both nationally respected experts in science and its history, who are equally at home in the humanities, and liberal education curricular reform experts to faculty development seminars. Over a three-year period, these seminars will, first, build humanities-and-science syllabus models and, then, integrate these models into existing or to-be-piloted general education curricular structures of 8 participating institutions. Participating institutions will send teams of two humanists and one scientist to the seminars. The project's goal is to integrate science and humanities core texts into a conversation within general education curricula in order to prepare our citizens to discuss, humanistically and responsibly, important intellectual and policy questions about science both within educational settings and broader social realms of American life.