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Dr. Martha Rosenthal Spring, 2001 Class Meetings:
Phone: 590-7220,
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The
Collegium of Integrated Learning: At the heart of the FGCU Liberal Studies Degree the Collegium of Integrated Learning provides an upper division core of courses designed to help Arts and Sciences students become a community of inquiry. Students and faculty members work together in these courses to explore the cultural, social, historical, philosophical, moral, scientific, and humanistic roots of contemporary issues and how they have developed across time. Individually and in teams, and in collaboration with faculty from various disciplines, students develop "intellectual histories" for specific contemporary issues and problems in each of the five Issues courses. These "histories" require students to build an integrated context by examining issues through a variety of perspectives and methods and to formulate their own interpretations and responses. Because the courses are structured to encourage problem-based learning, students are called upon to learn in ways that they may not be accustomed to, requiring critical, creative, systematic, and collaborative thinking and demanding the ability to find and intellectually defend connections among multiple points of knowledge. Success in this integrated core relies on the sophisticated use of communication, information, and technological skills. The chief aim of the integrated learning core is to prepare for the 21st century by reaching a deeper and more coherent understanding of how and why our world is changing. By bringing all multiple perspectives to bear on contemporary issues and analyzing carefully their historical foundations we are more apt to develop a fuller understanding, and perhaps, an ameliorative sense of ethics if not actions. |
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The
common ingredients that run through the liberal studies curriculum from
Styles and Ways to the Collegium Capstone are human ideas: our ideas
of who we are as individuals; our genius, stupidity, prejudices, nobility,
and brutalities; the mythical, social, and religious systems we have
engineered throughout history to justify and explain our actions and
to make us happy--on earth as well as in a variety of heavens and golden
isles; the art and literary works we have fashioned out of an immense
creativity to give shape, beauty, and meaning to our lives.
Through it all, the constant that characterizes us as a species is our human curiosity, our quest to know, to pursue an understanding of who we are, why we are, where we have been, and where we are going. It is this passion for knowing and learning that brings us back again to the purpose of the unique liberal studies degree offered by the College of Arts and Sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University: to understand how and why our world is changing and what it means to us for the 21st century. |
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official FGCU web page.
Florida Gulf Coast University
is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution.