Are the humanities relevant enough to the average undergraduate to be included as a required part of a general education program? The University of Idaho (UI) is currently ten years into the challenge of implementing a cross-disciplinary, university-wide general education program--the UI Core--that has the attention, if not always the support, of…

The "New Humanities" has called for new ways of engaging with Humanities texts; the European Science Foundation is just one major research funder to demand that the Humanities contribute to interdisciplinary collaborations. Meanwhile, traditionally trained disciplinary academics have resisted bringing traditional texts into…

Rather than return to a core curriculum that reflects the structures of knowledge and education developed for other contexts and needs, the humanities should create new structures appropriate to the students', culture's, and faculty's needs today, particularly through interdisciplinary collaboration. (MSE)

For liberal education to be successfully integrated into engineering education, engineers must first be convinced that the humanities and arts are important and worthy of respect. In the brief exposure they provide, liberal arts teachers can inspire engineers through their own passion for what they teach. (MSE)

The goal of this year-long project was to foster coherence throughout the humanities program, an interdisciplinary, team-taught sequence of four required undergraduate courses. The humanities program has no faculty of its own, but draws instructors from existing departments throughout the university. Growth of the program has brought…

In the summers of 1991 and 1992, 4-week faculty institutes were held at Kalamazoo Valley Community College (KVCC), in Michigan. Funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the institutes sought to examine the ways in which the humanities, science, and technology have each advanced human understanding. During the 1991…

Shifts in the enrollments and curricula of two-year colleges over the past 15 years have underscored the need for community college educators to develop a synthesis of career-occupational and liberal arts education. This task is especially important given the career-oriented goals and employed status of most community college students, the…

In 1988, 11 faculty members at Kalamazoo Valley Community College (KVCC), Michigan, taught a customized honors class at KVCC focussing on connections between disciplines. It soon became clear how little faculty members understood and appreciated their colleagues' fields and perspectives. Following the course, faculty participants concluded that…

This paper first evaluates discipline classification schemes and general differences between disciplines associated with the natural sciences and those associated with the humanities. It then reviews research which either asked students how professors in these fields teach, observed teachers in their classrooms, or asked students to describe their…