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Bard Common Courses

Photo by Pete Mauney '93 MFA '00
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Recognizing the existential challenge presented to young people, their families, and their communities, as well as to institutions of higher learning by the pandemic and its aftermath, the College is committed to meeting the COVID-19 crisis with an educational experience uniquely created to respond to this extraordinary moment.

New This Fall

This fall, the College will be offering a suite of multidisciplinary Common Courses created specifically for incoming first-year students as they embark on their education at Bard. Cohort building and connected liberal arts learning will be integral to all Common Course offerings.  Second-year students will also have an opportunity to register for Common Courses in August.

Features of the Common Courses

  • bring together teams of four or more faculty to offer a course that addresses a critical global and/or local contemporary issue from multidisciplinary perspectives, enabling students to fulfill two distribution requirements, and
  • allow for instruction either in person or online, but with an assumption of blended learning (online combined with place-based classroom educational methods) and creation of an online platform for each course.

Faculty Teams

Every faculty team will design shared elements of the course and smaller group experiences with the proviso that two distribution areas and different disciplinary approaches will be given equal weight. This allows for innovative curricular development in each course and continuity of instruction across all common course offerings. Common Courses give entering first-year students an opportunity to fulfill two distribution requirements with one four-credit class.

Course Planning for Fall

Five teams of faculty (four to six people in each) are already engaged in initial planning stages and conversation on common course design.

Epidemics, Society, and Culture

Faculty Team: Helen Epstein and Mike Tibbetts

What do epidemics tell us about microbes, markets, and ourselves? This course will cover the history, science, and art of protecting the health of populations and the social, political, philosophical, and cultural implications of public health catastrophes.

The Making of Citizens: Local, National, Global

Faculty Team: Michelle Murray and Simon Gilhooley

This course aims to interrogate and analyze the concept of citizenship. Drawing on different disciplinary approaches, they seek to encourage students to think about how citizenship emerges, exists, and differs at the local, national, and global levels, and what forms of participation are necessary to sustain meaningful citizenship for themselves and others.

Resilience, Survival, and Extinction

Faculty: Alex Benson

How do individuals, species, languages, cultures survive, show resilience, and become extinct? This course introduces students to methods of biological analysis and cultural interpretation that explore the many ways we understand resilience, survival, and extinction. It focuses on the practical, creative forms of resilience developed by humans and animals. It addresses the idea of evolution and the nature of change in human and natural history, including widespread biodiversity loss, from the perspective of the sciences and the humanities.

Designing for Immediate Futures

Faculty: Susan Merriam

This course invites students to approach design as a tool for reflecting on the existing worlds in which we find ourselves and as a means to rethink them and invent new ones. How might we live together in the future and why? In the spirit of critique and experimentation, students will engage in visual projects, design practices, and the study of the history of the ways the spaces around us have been constructed and understood.

Alternate Worlds

Faculty: Karen Sullivan

In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien responds to accusations that fantasy constitutes an irresponsible “escapist” flight from reality. Comparing the dreary bridge at Bletchley Railway Station in England to the rainbow bridge Bifröst in Old Norse myth, he asks “whether railway-engineers, if they had been brought up on more fantasy, might not have done better with all their abundant means than they commonly do.” In these courses, we will be considering the relation between imagination and reality by considering counterfactual histories, fantastical literary works, and utopias or dystopias. To what extent is our experience of the “real world” (including real crises, like the current coronavirus epidemic) mediated by imagined ones? How do alternate worlds help us to reimagine ourselves as we are?

Project Spotlight

Alternate Worlds
St. Stephen's College of Magic Arts
Arseny Khakhalin, Assistant Professor of Biology, designed a medieval fantasy map of the Sawkill Watershed, including Bard College and the surrounding area.

   

  

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