Educational Initiatives Award 1996

Center for the Teaching and Study of American Cultures

In 1991, the University of California at Berkeley initiated the American cultures breadth requirement. To date, faculty members from some 41 departments or programs have developed over 200 new courses that analyze how the diversity of American's constitue nt cultural traditions and their interactions have shaped and continue to shape American identify and experience. This new approach responds directly to the problem encountered in numerous disciplines of how better to present the diversity of American exp erience to the diverse American students we now educate. To date 34,000 students have enrolled in these courses, which have been taught by 154 different instructors.

A significant aspect of the program is the American Cultures summer seminar, initiated by Ron Choy and Professor William Simmons. They foresaw that one problem the new requirement faced was that many Berkeley faculty members were prepared to teach about o ne group and a few were prepared to teach about two groups, but the demand that the course include at least three and often more groups put it beyond the range of expertise of many faculty members. The summer seminar is intended, in part, to help faculty overcome this limitation. Each June, a number of Berkeley faculty members are offered stipends to support the research required for them to transform existing concepts and courses into forms that fit the senate specifications.

As part of their stipend, faculty have the chance to attend a biweekly two-hour seminar, followed by discussion, in which members of the groups present their research and their problems. During the winter and spring semesters, they meet regularly, discuss ing ongoing problems, strategies, and resources freely, candidly, and at length. During these meetings, faculty who have little opportunity to talk in depth about their fields with colleagues outside their discipline are able to find connections between o ften seemingly distant fields, Forestry and English, for example. The summer seminars result in hundreds of cross fertilizations, which enhance the intellectual lives of faculty and students at Berkeley.

In addition to enhancing the content of individual courses, the seminar has also transformed the pedagogical styles of the participating faculty, opening and energizing their interactions with their students, provoking the invention of comparative and int egrative structures for organizing and presenting disparate material.

Every member of the UCB undergraduate population has been given access to cutting-edge thinking on some of the most urgent issues facing the state and nation today, and their rather remarkable enthusiasms for the requirement is all the more remarkable for the fact that this is a required course. For both students and faculty, it can be the richest intellectual experience of their Berkeley careers.