During summer 2012, nine faculty members gathered for a week around a seminar table in the Witten Center for the Core Curriculum in Hamilton Hall to present ideas for courses relating to history and cultures from around the world and to identify the best ways to turn their ideas into syllabi that satisfy the Columbia College Global Core requirement.
The conversation was part of the Chavkin Chang Workshop, a weeklong colloquium sponsored by Arnold Chavkin ’74, ’77 BU and his wife, Laura Chang ’77 BU. The workshop runs in collaboration with the Committee on the Global Core and gives professors the opportunity to work together on redesigning existing courses and developing new courses that could have the same impact on students as Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization have had for generations.
History Professor Caterina Pizzigoni worked with History Professor Pablo Piccato, Political Science Professor Pablo Pinto and Latin American & Iberian Cultures Professor Marc Hertzman to develop and improve "Primary Texts of Latin American Civilization" during the Chavkin Chang Workshop.
“It is a unique experience in that course design is usually very solitary,” says Patricia Grieve, the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Professor of the Humanities, chair of the Committee on Global Core and professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. “In the workshop, we are able to see how much Columbia faculty know outside their discipline and we also help them open their eyes to things they don’t know that will enrich their classes.”
The workshop came about as a result of the College’s new Global Core, which replaced the Major Cultures requirement in 2008. The Global Core requires students to choose two courses from an approved list of classes from various departments that explore the cultures of Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East in a historical context. Like other Core courses, the Global Core consists of courses that are broadly introductory, interdisciplinary, temporally or spatially expansive, and that expose students to a rich collection of primary sources, be they texts, artifacts or other media, that have shaped civilization. They are also intended to be seminar courses.
Providing students with the opportunity to engage with primary texts from around the world is not only an intellectual exercise. It also is a practical one, preparing them to operate during a time when globalization is ever-present.
“The aim is to expose students to a range of perspectives on fundamental human issues and to enrich their sense of themselves as members of a global community,” says Roosevelt Montás ’95, ’04 GSAS, director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. “As our world has become more integrated, and as Core classrooms have become more international, these skills assume a global reach, equipping our students to understand their own lives in broad terms that emphasize our shared humanity.”
Global Core courses fall into two categories: those that focus on a specific culture or civilization, tracing its appearance and/or existence across a significant span of time and sometimes across more than one present-day country or region; and those that address several world settings and cultures comparatively, in terms of a common theme, a set of analytic questions or interactions between different world regions.
As the Global Core has grown, faculty have worked to ensure that courses capture multiple perspectives instead of focusing on the specific country or region in which the professor who is teaching at that moment is an expert.
“We need to ask, what were the enduring bundles of thought that have been important over time, and use these to build our courses,” Grieve says. “We create a more comparative, interdisciplinary approach, which allows us to bring in faculty and primary sources from many disciplines.”
A selection of books from Global Core courses.
Chavkin and Chang pledged in 2010 to support faculty participation in the further development of the global component of the Core Curriculum. The workshop, which is in its third year and is funded for five years, gives professors the chance to work together to develop courses, merging diverse disciplines into syllabi that expose students to our global civilization, one primary text at a time. In the first two years, more than a dozen courses were created or reimagined as a result of the workshop.
History Professor Pablo Piccato attended the workshop in 2012 with the intention of developing a class that had the same format as Contemporary Civilization but focused on Latin America. He worked with faculty members from other departments to search for texts that captured moments ranging from before Columbus arrived through the civil wars of the late 20th century.
The course, “Primary Texts of Latin American Civilization” — a collaborative project with Piccato and Political Science Professor Pablo Pinto, History Professor Caterina Pizzigoni and Latin American and Iberian Cultures Professor Marc Hertzman — has been oversubscribed every semester that it has been taught. During the 2013 Chavkin Chang Workshop, Piccato and others met with graduate students to further improve the class and expose the students to it so they could also teach.
“It was a rare opportunity to build a class in this way,” Piccato says. “Having people from different disciplines get together to talk about our teaching is unique. It allowed us to collect a combination of texts that belong to different traditions.”
Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director of Columbia's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), had a similar experience.
She developed a course, “Political History of Sexuality in the Caribbean,” during the 2011 Chavkin Chang Workshop, and the conversations she had helped her introduce new texts that added nuance and depth to the class.
“The debates that we had regarding what constitutes global knowledge and how to teach ‘the global’ were very fruitful,” she says. “These discussions further convinced me of not only the enormous importance of developing the global curriculum but also about how this process is part of thinking about the Core Curriculum and the University more generally.”
In addition, the workshop gave her an opportunity to think about how CSER could broaden its focus and improve the experience of the students seeking a broad perspective on culture.
“We think it is important for students to get a global perspective on race, ethnicity and other forms of social difference,” she says. “We believe that this emphasis allows students to consider that what happens in one space is related to, and illuminated by, what happens elsewhere, and that there is a history to this interconnectivity.”
— Ethan Rouen ’04J, ’11 BU