General Education

GenEd is focused on making connections.

GenEd courses make connections across areas of study as illustrated in these courses:

• Global Cities, Language and Society, Cyberspace and Society.
• Politics of Identity, Sustainable Design, Global Slavery.

GenEd makes connections to current controversies as illustrated in these courses:

• Doing Justice, Race & Poverty in American Cinema.
• Border Crossings, Guerilla Altruism.

GenEd makes connections from academic knowledge to experience.  A course in educational policy takes students into schools and community centers. A course in sustainability challenges them to design a solution for storm-water run-off.  A course in creativity assigns them to go to First Friday to interview an artist. “The Philadelphia Experience” has become a hallmark of the new GenEd, with many courses taking students into the city for direct encounters connected to their studies. A science course takes students to the Waterworks to study 19th century sewage treatment. These encounters leverage the interest our students already have in Philadelphia.

These and other modes of stretching and contextualizing traditional disciplinary content prepare our students to deal with a rapidly globalizing world, in which the resolution of complicated issues increasingly calls upon the ability to see a problem from many angles and to synthesize divergent perspectives.

Ultimately, GenEd is about equipping our students to make connections between what they learn, their lives and their communities.