Designing Matter, initiated in Spring 2004, was the first of several Common Courses at Virginia supported by the “Teachers for a New Era” (TNE) grant, joint with the UVA Curry School of Education. The Common Course program was envisioned by Ed Ayers, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, and is funded by support from the Carnegie Corporation, as well as the Annenberg and Ford Foundations.  (This program has its antecedents in the highly successful UVA Common Courses “21st Century Choices: War, Justice and Human Rights” headed by Professors James Childress and Michael Smith and “Environmental Decisions” also coordinated by Childress with an interdisciplinary team of faculty.)  Other TNE Common Courses include CCFA 200 The Mind of an Artist, CCSS 200 Rural Poverty in Our Time, and CCSC 202 Food for Thought.  Victor Luftig (English) heads up the TNE grant for the Provost and the Teaching Resource Center Staff, Judith Reagan (Drama), Dorothe Bach (German) and others provide support for the Common Course component of it. 

 

The TNE grant seeks to improve universities' preparation of future K-12 teachers and emphasizes the involvement of Arts & Sciences faculty in that training. The Common Courses reflect this emphasis by recognizing that the multidisciplinary knowledge required of elementary school teachers as the model for all liberal arts education.  In this way, Common Courses, with their sweep through the disciplines, address issues of content important for teachers in training, who ultimately might choose to enroll in this course.  But they are also an innovative experiment in curriculum development for the College that aims to provide students with a shared experience, unified knowledge, and insights into how major branches of inquiry—the sciences, arts, social sciences and humanities— are interrelated across broad themes.  Common Courses acknowledge and build upon longstanding traditions while incorporating into the curriculum what experience and scholarship are showing—that today’s most fascinating questions and significant challenges often require new groupings of knowledge and expertise.