Core Curriculum
 
In addition to its general education requirements, which involve specific options depending on one’s major, McMurry University provides a University Core Curriculum of three courses which are taken by all students. The Core seeks to build a comprehensive framework to facilitate connections throughout students’ academic careers and to prepare them to understand dynamic features of world and national societies in the twenty-first century.

The first-year requirement is Core 1300: Ethics, a course designed to familiarize students with major modes of ethical discourse and to sensitize them to ethical issues involving personal and group integrity, the use of power, and problems of communication in a pluralistic society.

The second-year requirement is Core 2300: Persons and Communities, which stresses the interaction between individuals, groups, and societies. Based on the premise that humans are both products and creators of their societies, it traces the interplay of cultural cohesion and diversity in the moral, religious, political, and artistic achievements of a number of selected societies.   The course currently focuses on Latin America, the Middle East, and Japan.

The third year requirement is Core 3300: Human Knowledge.  This course examines three major scientific achievements (e.g. Euclidean geometry, Newtonian Physics, modern genetics), showing their roots in the perceived needs of societies and their impact in transforming those societies. The course explores the interrelatedness of the cognitive institutions of societies and the transformative impact (and limitations) of new paradigms of explanation.

The courses are directed by interdisciplinary teams drawn from across the University.  Persons and Communities and Human Knowledge are team-taught; Ethics is conducted with small sections with one instructor each.

HISTORY OF THE CORE

The McMurry Core Curriculum grew out of years of studies, research, attendance at national conferences, and investigation of the educational programs of other colleges. The Core was initiated into the curriculum with two pilot sections of the Ethics course in the spring of 1992, preceded the previous summer by a two-week workshop funded by a local foundation.  In the workshop, six faculty (drawn from the various schools and colleges of the University) studied classic and contemporary ethics texts, case studies, and works of literature with ethical implications; and were instructed in teaching ethics. During the following two summers, three-week seminars for the second and third year courses were funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with outside experts leading team members in studying the texts to be read in the courses as well as other sources.

By the fall of 1995, all three courses had been introduced into the curriculum.
 

01-25-06