The Core Curriculum is the heart of the
undergraduate program at NYU Abu Dhabi
and it speaks both to the breath that we
want the undergraduate education to have
and to the cultivation of a sensibility
of global citizenship and leadership
that students can take with them beyond
their years in the university.
It allows you to build bridges of understanding even if we know we're not all the same.
Anchored in those places that we are the
same, which then allows us to work
together to create a world of common
purpose and of common achievement.
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We curate
a portion of of the Core, the Colloquia, around global challenges: sustainability,
health, justice, peace, inequality, and a
rich understanding of humanity.
Core courses for example on migration, on prejudice, on tolerance, on water, look at
significant global issues. They raise
questions that are very, very hard to
answer from any one disciplinary
perspective. They are there to baffle, to
confound, to inspire, to get our students
to think critically
and question knowledge and sources of
knowledge and generating knowledge
themselves.
Some of the Core classes have taken so
far are "Relationship of Government and
Religion", "Coastal Urbanization and Environmental Change",
"Rogue Fictions", "Cooperation".
"Imagine Cities, Re-imagining Nature", "Global Population," "Thinking", and "Democracy and its Critics".
I'm a literature professor I love
teaching a course that has three
engineers and two computer scientists
and somebody who's interested in economics
and maybe if I'm lucky there's
someone who's interested in literature.
As an economics major it's important
that we explore the Core classes, those
are areas we don't really explore in the
economics degree. We're able to take
into consideration our knowledge in
economics and we can apply it to these areas.
It's not just kind of a top-down
professor telling you this is what you
need to know but it's actually, I'm
learning from everyone in the class.
Many of our students come from countries where they're more passive recipients of
knowledge or they'd be in large lecture
classes in their home countries not in
small seminar-style Core classes, so all
of this is a wonderful preparation for
when they go abroad and with that
additional confidence and maturity can
then think about, OK, what I learned in
my migration class how does that apply
to understanding the socio-cultural, socio-political milieu of immigration and
migration in France when I'm in Paris.
The Core Curriculum has really allowed
me to get to know individuals that I
might not have gotten to know otherwise.
I think that's the beauty of the Core Curriculum. You get to explore, and I think it breaks personal boundaries.
The Core does help me understand the
complexity of the world, and myself, it
makes me question my own beliefs, my own values. The Core does give me the
opportunity to have a deeper
understanding about humanity.
The courses are organized around much more specific topics. They're usually unique to the
individual professor who's teaching it
so they grow out of passion or research interest.
So, I've been teaching a Core course
called "Extinction", trying to get at that
through great literature, and so what
that meant was we read some journalists
and Elizabeth Kolbert spoke on the Sixth
Extinction and we read the flood stories
and the Bible, and the Quran, to talk
about near extinction events. How does
this shape our understanding of what
it means to be human?
"Democracy and its Critics" was a
J-Term class with a one-week trip to
Greece so everyone in the class was
assigned a rule, and I was assigned the
rule of Socrates and so we went to those
ancient places where debates and
speeches took place and we actually gave
our own speeches.
We study how has global warming affected sea levels in Sydney, and its biodiversity?
And if it weren't for this class I wouldn't be concerned of what's going on in our world right now
with climate change.
We went to Uganda because I wanted them to see an
endangered species in the wild. We went
trekking and we saw mountain gorillas.
Many of them came back excited about the idea of working in development
in Africa, they hadn't thought about that
before.
I think with the demands of today
of the 21st century, I think the Core
Curriculum is not only recommended, it is
essential to being able to function in
an ever-growing international community
where patterns are converging and
fields are overlapping.
The faculty train them
to challenge the arguments, to not
accept knowledge at face value, to
discuss these things in respectful and
civil but profoundly meaningful ways.
I think that's one of the best things the
Core classes can do.
