New Courses Created for 2017-2018 School Year
Every year, Exeter students returning to school from spring break eagerly check their Post Office box for the new Courses of Instruction booklet. Although the bulk of course offerings stay the same, for the next academic year, 2017-2018, numerous faculty in all departments have worked hard to rework their course offerings.
“There is an unspoken rule that when a new course is added to the COI, another course needs to be dropped. There is an equilibrium that we have achieved over the years that we need to maintain.”
After a lengthy, multi-stage process of review, consideration and selection, a considerable number of proposals have made the final cut. Coupled with the newly implemented “sandbox” courses, the result of a faculty-led effort to allow for more creative interdisciplinary studies, the latest course catalog offers a wide variety of options never seen before. Though the official list of sandbox courses is still a few weeks away from being publicized, many Exonians are already finding it hard to choose the classes they want to take most.
The religion department, already renowned for its college-level offerings that encompass topics as esoteric as philosophy, existentialism and epistemology, saw an addition of one elective called “Finding a Spirit of Resilience.” According to the official description, this course aims to help students develop mindful practices such as meditation, mindful running, yoga or music. Instructor Kathleen Brownback, who worked on creating the new course with Rabbi Jennifer Marx-Asch, wanted to teach students ways of dealing with everyday stress. “Stress isn’t going away—if it doesn’t come our way we find ways to create it,” said Brownback. “We hope it will give students practical tools for developing qualities of presence, mindfulness, and balance.”
Next year, the religion department will also open another session of the seemingly popular winter elective “Imagining Your Future” in the fall. Although the course ran for the first time this school year, it “attracted quite a significant following, with 40 students in three sessions,” according to Peter Vorkink, the Department Chair. “[The elective] is based on Stanford’s most popular course called Designing Your Life,” he explained. “It’s for seniors to think through what they value, believe in and want to do in the next five to ten years of their life.”
Meanwhile, the music department introduced a new two-hundred level course for students who want to study music technology. Unlike in other departments with larger numbers of full-time faculty, all three members of the Music Department, Chair Peter Schultz and instructors Rohan Smith and Kristofer Johnson, collaborated to create this elective. Although a suitable instructor has yet to be found, they are determined to run the course, which will make use of “one of the features of the new facilities addition, the music tech suite, equipped with beautiful, brand new state-of-the-art computers, keyboards, mixers and softwares.” Currently, the suite only has four work stations, so enrollment is limited to eight students per section. However, Schultz emphasizes that if many students show interest, the Academy has the capability of doubling the number of recording stations in the suite.
Another department that saw a large number of new courses is the English department, with a total of two additions for the senior winter electives and nine for senior spring. The new electives cover topics like fictions of finance, writing the body and contemporary Korean culture. According to Department Chair Ellen Wolff, the English department changed the list of electives for both terms, “with an eye—as always—to offering courses that reflect a diversity of voices.” The revised author immersions series examines the works of contemporary American writers Viet Thanh Nguyen and Junot Diaz, both immigrants from oppressive countries who won Pulitzer Prizes in Fiction for their blunt narration of human struggles and triumphs. English Instructor Christine Knapp attributed the drastic change to recent departmental agenda that calls for the restructuring of Senior electives.
Knapp, who proposed the spring elective “Beyond Korean Cool,” cited her deep fascination with Korean history and culture as inspiration for the course. “My husband is Korean, so I’ve heard a lot of interesting things from his father who is a refugee from North Korea,” she said. After reading a New Yorker article about the newly published English translations of contemporary Korean literature by Dalkey Archives, she decided to create the elective based on books that examine the clash between old and new Korea.
Knapp hopes that this course will prompt students to “look beyond the veneer of pop culture and think about the effects of rapid [economic] change.” The “Writing The Body” elective, created by English Instructor Elizabeth Dean, draws upon her observations of students struggling to describe body parts without using clichés. Dean’s mother was a pen and ink artist, so she grew up observing her draw. “My hope is that in studying representations of the body in art and literature especially, we will inform not only how we see all bodies but also how we write about them,” Dean said.
Meanwhile, English Instructor Nathaniel Hawkins built a course based on literature of the American West, incorporating some reading materials he previously taught in the old ENG410 and ENG420. He was motivated by a personal interest in the material as well as appreciation for “its interdisciplinary implications.”
Although it is now largely a departmental matter, the task of recommending or disapproving new courses used to fall into the hands of the Curriculum Committee (CC). A standing committee of faculty members, the CC was created in the mid 1980s to “review anything related with the curriculum,” according to Vorkink.
The current Committee Head, Brooks Moriarty, stated that its task had shifted more towards brainstorming ways in which interdepartmental efforts could be made to optimize the quality of an Exeter education. “The Principal, in the past, has charged the CC to conduct studies, draft reports and recommendations that guide curricular change,” he said. This role has especially been important in the past few months, when the committee worked with department heads to conceptualize and streamline sandbox courses. “For the Sandbox courses, we looked for creative course options that focused on interdisciplinary work or on experiential learning opportunities,” said English Instructor Tyler Caldwell, member of the CC.
Currently, the CC works hard to review the many sandbox proposals it obtained from faculty of all departments. The courses “are still in their formative stages,” said Vorkink, who was reticent about sharing specific information related to these courses as they have not been made public. Meanwhile, William Jordan, Head of the History Department, stated, “There were four history teachers who proposed sandbox courses: me, Mr. McConnell, Betty Luther-Hillman and Ms. Lim.”
Jordan proposed a course called “Harkness Night School,” in which seniors would meet and discuss about effective Harkness strategies and practice running Harkness sessions on their own with community members outside of class. The idea came to him after watching the election and seeing people’s disbelief. “People don’t talk with others who disagree with them politically,” Jordan said, emphasizing how Harkness would be a good cure for the current polarization in America because it prompts people to “discuss these issues in a civil way.” However, Jordan does not think that his course would be voted into the curriculum this year, as there is very limited space for new courses. “[The CC] has said to me and others that it’s a great idea, so maybe I can do it down the road.”
One reason why so many sandbox proposals will not make the final cut is because the school does not want “a lot of courses with low enrollment,” according to Jordan. Echoing these sentiments, CC’s head Moriarty Brooks commented, “There is an unspoken rule that when a new course is added to the COI, another course needs to be dropped. There is an equilibrium that we have achieved over the years that we need to maintain.”
Additionally, all new courses have to go through a complicated reviewing process that starts with the department faculty then the department chair, then the chairs of all departments and eventually end with all members of the faculty. “Procedurally, the faculty in this school have the right to vote on every new course. Any new course of the academy requires faculty approval, as will be the case with the slate of new sandbox courses,” said Vorkink. When examining course proposals, Department Chairs have to consider multiple factors, ranging from staffing and topic relevance to potential student interest.
Although faculty members are the ones making these proposals, students also have varying degrees of influence, depending on the department. The music department, for example, has written a course about opera traditions based on the initiative of a group of seniors whom Schultz described as “opera fanatics.” “In order to give these guys something to study we wrote a course and put it in the course catalog,” he said, laughing. In the same vein, many departments have rotating 590 courses that allow students and faculty to explore selected topics based on individual interest. According to Jordan, however, 590 history courses often end up in the permanent catalog thanks to students’ enduring enthusiasm. Examples of this would include HIS558, “Genocide in the modern world” and HIS587, “Persecuting Deviance.”
Many Exonians, especially current lowers and uppers, are excited to try out new electives for the next academic year. Upper Julia Goydan, with her long-standing interest in cultures and identities, wishes to take “Passing,” an English course that examines the dualities of personal affiliations. “I really want to learn more about different identities and cultures, and a fun way of doing it is through English and reading books,” said Goydan. Meanwhile, upper Molly Canfield is interested in a potential sandbox course taught by Elizabeth Reyes, Director of Service Learning and ESSO. Canfield, a firm activist and co-head of Exeter’s Amnesty chapter, shared that she was excited to not have to “scramble to find time” for issues she was passionate about. For prep Rosemary Beck, astronomy, genetics and women in religion are perfect senior electives for her. “I already planned out my courses before coming to Exeter,” she said. “I will look at the new catalogs though to check if I still want to take these courses.”