Seminars

Purpose: To collectively explore the pedagogical purpose and best practice approaches to interdisciplinary and global humanities “core” at the level of higher education to meet the challenges of the emerging world. A major challenge to teaching humanities today is how to rethink its pedagogy in such a way that students not only learn about different cultures of the world but learn from them to think critically about the way each of us understand, experience, and broaden our own culture. This Seminar welcomes the participation of faculty and administrators from Columbia and beyond, as well as select invested students, to 1) help frame the kinds of questions that most demand humanity’s collective concern in this new age of interdependence; 2) to identify those classics—including seminal advances in contemporary sciences where advisable—from throughout the world’s traditions that will help bring those concerns into sharpest focus; and 3) to rethink from a fresh perspective the institutional structures and resources by which this new generation of interdisciplinary “core” courses may be most effectively implemented.