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CASE Critical Approaches to the Arts and Sciences (CAPP previously Topics)

In Spring 2010, as the result of the deliberations of various bodies, including the College’s Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE), the College performed an extensive review of the Topics requirement and reached the following conclusions:

• the objectives of and rationale for Topics should be clarified and rearticulated;
• Topics courses should be more clearly integrated into the undergraduate curriculum;
• the inventory of courses should be refreshed and expanded;
• the College ought to facilitate more collaboration and the sharing of ideas among faculty members who teach these courses.

One additional recommendation was that the College rename Topics, largely to avoid confusion among students and to make the purpose of the requirement both obvious and transparent. As a result of this deliberative process, the College has taken concrete steps to revitalize the Topics curriculum under the new name of CASE Critical Approaches to the Arts and Sciences (CASE CAPP). As with Topics and beginning in Summer 2011 with the initiation of the campuswide General Education Curriculum, students in the College are required to take one course from the Critical Approaches inventory.

CASE Critical Approaches courses help first- and second-year students begin to develop an understanding of the fundamental questions and methods in the various disciplines, departments and programs represented in the College and in the liberal arts. Rather than focusing on depth of coverage, CASE Critical Approaches courses, as a whole, should introduce students to the different kinds of scholarship that take place in a university and to the ways that universities organize knowledge. In addition, the CASE Critical Approaches courses serve as a gateway to the College experience and encourage students to engage intellectually and creatively with a wide variety of current and provocative issues. We also anticipate that courses related to current or upcoming Themester themes will be part of the CASE Critical Approaches inventory.

Through CASE Critical Approaches courses, students should learn about the ways particular disciplines solve problems, seek answers and organize ideas. Alternatively, these courses can demonstrate the merits of viewing a problem from an interdisciplinary or a multidisciplinary perspective. These courses should also be designed so that they teach students how to seek information from various sources, to evaluate the validity of that information, and to construct arguments. In other words, one of the main objectives of CASE Critical Approaches courses is to instill sound research and writing practices that students will employ in their future undergraduate coursework.

Any full-time member (including full-time lecturers) of the College faculty is eligible to teach CASE Critical Approaches. In the best case, faculty involved in this initiative will span the disciplines, come from departments large and small, and include both junior and senior scholars. These faculty members will have several opportunities to interact with other faculty members teaching CASE Critical Approaches courses and to learn from this community of committed teachers. Faculty members may use CASE Critical Approaches courses to explore subjects that fall outside the curricular offerings of a particular department, enabling them to introduce students to new or related topics. They may also take a question pursued in their disciplines and introduce students to the approaches used by scholars in that field to investigate and understand the problem. 

In keeping with the policy for Topics, enrollments in CASE Critical Approaches courses will be credited to the departments, and these courses, depending on their size and capacity, may carry additional AI appointments. CASE Critical Approaches offers departments the opportunity to attract students at the beginning of their studies in the College and offers students CASE Breadth of Inquiry credit and a means of satisfying a campuswide General Education Breadth of Inquiry Requirement.

All proposals for CASE Critical Approaches courses should be submitted for review and approval by the College even if they were previously part of the Topics inventory. Proposals for courses to be offered during the 2012 – 2013 academic year are due on Friday, October 21st at 5:00 p.m. Faculty will be notified in mid-November regarding which courses have been selected. Proposals should be submitted to Steve Watt, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, at asug@indiana.edu.

To propose a course for CASE Critical Approaches, please submit a syllabus and answer the following 5 questions:

1. To whom will the course appeal?
2. What learning outcomes do you anticipate for this course?
3. Why does it make more sense to offer this course as part of the Critical Approaches inventory rather than through your department?
4. Do you anticipate 60 or 120 students? (To ensure equity across departments and for the College to be able to accommodate the necessary number of students, Critical Approaches courses proposed must target one or the other enrollment size.)
5. Recognizing that many courses do not fit neatly into any one category, should this course carry CASE A&H, CASE S&H, or CASE N&M credit (it must fall within one of these rubrics.)?