There and Back Again: Learning from the History of a Freshman Seminar Sequence.

Teaching does not happen in a vacuum just as good courses do not fall from the sky in whole cloth. How and what we teach is woven from any number of past or present influences that include, for instance, tradition, conversation with colleagues, student requests, job market demands, curriculum committees, popular culture, academic advances in a field, or how an academic unit has developed over time. Many honors programs or colleges, however, teach a course sequence that is anchored in the classics and has core texts that one might think are somewhat immune to change. While all such course sequences had a beginning and a developmental trajectory, I would wager that often their genesis is forgotten even if the success of the honors program or college rests on them. Remembering the roots, however, serves as a touchstone when pedagogical or developmental crossroads arise. Knowing why a course was originated and how it developed can facilitate decision-making, clarify the program's mission, and allow experimentation without losing the program's focus. Historical consideration of the genesis and development of a course sequence teaches us how to gain institutional support, develop a foundation, achieve collaboration inside and outside the program, and enhance faculty development. The evolution of The Human Event, a course sequence at Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University provides a case study of using a program's history to understand its present and improve its future. While Barrett is situated at a public university with 76,000 students and is now a large college in itself with 4,803 honors students, it grew out of a much smaller program. From the beginning, The Human Event sequence has been a part of it and has contributed to its health and growth. Thus, the experience and insights drawn from considering its history might be of interest to honors programs and colleges of any size and at any institution as an example of what can be gained from studying the origin and development of signature classes. INCEPTION, INITIAL ORGANIZATIONAL FRAMEWORKS, AND INITIAL OBJECTIVES The idea for The Human Event originated in the late 1970s when physicist Richard Jacob saw Jacob Bronowski's BBC series on PBS titled The Ascent of Man, an interesting and entertaining look at the development of Western culture. Richard Jacob, then Director of the Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU, was in a position to act on his perception that ASU needed to offer a similar series to its honors students. Although The Ascent of Man inspired the conversation and the title of the seminar sequence, Jacob desired something different from a Western Civilization course and certainly not a lecture course. He approached the chair of philosophy, Ted Humphrey, to help develop a two-semester freshman seminar to anchor his honors program's core curriculum. Humphrey had experience in teaching a replica of the University of Chicago's Great Books of the Western World year-long course as well as experience implementing a required six-quarter, two-year sequence modeled after Columbia University's great ideas course. When I arrived at Barrett, the terms "Chicago model" and "Columbia model" were occasionally bandied about, so I was curious about the difference, which I learned was rooted in the ways that courses are organized and the consequent impact on contexts and learning objectives. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MODEL At the start of Great Books of the Western World, as compiled by philosopher Mortimer Adler and then-president of the University of Chicago Robert Hutchins, is a two-volume Syntopicon that is essentially a synthesis of topics, listing the concepts and the occurrences of each concept in the numerically ordered books to come. Thus, the University of Chicago's model, at least in the 1970s, was topic-based with a top-down "here's what we are going to teach you" approach. Humphrey reports that those who adopted the University of Chicago model followed one of two routes: (1) they took the students through the works serially, starting with the Greeks and studying the rest of Western culture as an increasingly detailed critique and development of the Greek foundation, or (2) they developed a more topical emphasis focusing on, say justice, starting with Plato and then Aristotle and other writers on justice, in or out of sequence. …