A Curriculum About Connecting: Harvard Launches Gen Ed

Lizzie Thompson ’12 had likely never thought about Shakespeare and disco in the same sentence—until now.

Having signed up for a class in modern Shakespeare this past semester, though, Thompson soon found herself at a performance of The Donkey Show, a thoroughly modern interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream being shown now through January 2 at the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.). Besides being part of her coursework, the show—set in what looks like a 1970s nightclub—is the creation of Diane Paulus, the theater’s artistic director and one of her two professors for the course

“We look at Shakespeare, but we also look at how the theater is moving in modern directions,” Thompson says of the class which compares Shakespeare’s original works with modern interpretations performed live at the A.R.T.

The course, called “Theater, Dream, Shakespeare,” is just one example of the new General Education curriculum–an updated, more dynamic approach to teaching that offers today’s students a more interactive, hands-on educational experience.

Select the image below to watch the Gen Ed course trailers.

The Gen Ed curriculum, composed of liberal arts classes taken outside of an undergraduate’s concentration, replaced the Core system that had been around for more than 30 years until this fall semester. Of the 244 classes that are now part of the Gen Ed curriculum, many are Core classes that have been revised significantly. Others—including classes like “What is Life? From Quarks to Consciousness,” which covers the underlying physics of the natural world—are completely new.

According to faculty involved in the genesis of Gen Ed, the new curriculum connects in-class learning to its broader implications—not only across disciplines, but beyond the classroom as well. Several of the courses are co-taught by faculty from different departments.

“We have created a curriculum about connecting,” said Evelynn Hammonds, Dean of Harvard College and Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies.

With the new curriculum, students take one class in each of the eight new course categories. The new framework also encourages professors to take more risks—in the form of field trips, hands-on experiments, guest speakers, and more creative assignments—and encourages students to take risks as well.

Assignments will often involve working with multimedia, as in Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History Shigehisa Kuriyama’s comparative class on European and Asian beliefs regarding medicine and the body. Instead of a traditional “paper,” students create short online videos on what they’ve learned.

Stephanie Sandler, the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, said the new goals mean the students in her “Poetry Without Borders” class learn how to be better readers of poetry through a variety of methods.

“We go to poetry readings on campus, and visit the Poetry Room at the Lamont Library,” she says. “But we also explore websites that make poems, poets’ voices, and poets’ performances available online.”

For Thompson, her class on Shakespeare gave her a chance to learn from someone she might never run across in a traditional classroom situation.

“I’m really looking forward to hearing more from Diane Paulus as we continue,” she said of the artistic director. “It’s fascinating to learn from someone who is actually living in the world of theater, because it’s a very different viewpoint from most people’s.”