- The word I would use to
describe Shooting the Core
would probably be "challenging."
- I think my word would be "innovation."
- If I had to choose a
word that best described
Shooting the Core, I would say that word
would be "enriching."
- I would say "unique."
- The word to describe Shooting the Core
would be "relevance," I think.
How did Shooting the Core
enrich my experience?
So, I think that last year I did Lit Hum
as a first-year CC student,
and even though I learned a lot
about classics, I didn't
really know how to
apply them into the real world.
I definitely learned
how to analyze articles,
but I just don't feel that it was relevant
to what we're studying right now.
But, CC this year definitely helped a lot,
so for example, when we were
studying Hobbes or Locke,
the idea that there should
be a balancing power
between government and
people, it's really helping us
understand what is gun control,
what should gun control be,
what's the extent of gun control law.
So I think that the very fact
that what we are learning
is helping us analyze
what's happening right now
in the world enriches my overall
experience with the core.
- Well, I think with the
core curriculum, you read
all of these really amazing
texts and think about them
in a classroom setting,
and what Shooting the
Core did is it encouraged
me and my peers to step
outside of the classroom
and think about the texts
in the larger context
of the world and specifically
the city in which we live
and really pushed us to
get outside perspectives
on the texts.
- Shooting the Core enriched my experience
of the core curriculum
because it encouraged me
to interact with the texts in a new way
that I previously hadn't
done here at Columbia
and I had to learn to adapt these ideas
from centuries-old text
into modern society
and had to incorporate them when going out
and filming and I think that
really enriched the experience.
- I'm a financial econ and
computer science major.
I didn't really take a
lot of humanities classes,
so my only exposure to humanities
is the mandatory classes,
U Writing and Lit Hum, so CC, specifically
Shooting the Core,
comparing to what I did with
humanities before is that
it's not very traditional
in terms of formatting.
We don't have a paper,
we don't have an exam,
but instead we have an
overarching project.
And I like the fact that it's a project
that has different elements to it.
It has video shooting, it has
interview, it has editing,
and it also has a paper element to it.
So, I feel like this
multi-elements project
really helped us understand different ways
of learning things instead
of just writing a paper
and taking exams, we can learn
through interviewing people;
we can learn through
different perspectives;
and we still get a traditional paper.
So I really liked the fact that it has
a lot of elements to it
and we can learn through
different perspectives.
- I mean, I think this
experience is a lot less
inwardly focused and also the documentary,
or film-making aspect of it,
is a really different method than is used
traditionally at Columbia
when we're encouraged
to share our ideas through papers
or maybe just class discussions.
This was really encouraging
us to look outside
of ourselves and express our
ideas through a new medium.
- The advantage of working collectively
is definitely tremendous,
because humanities as a whole,
we don't really get the
perspectives from other members
besides class discussion.
I did Lit Hum, I did
all the paper by myself.
I certainly did my exam by myself.
And the fact that we can
work with different people
for the project definitely
helped us understand
what different people think.
There are people from
South America in my group.
There are people from local
New Jersey from my group.
And when we're brainstorming
for the ideas of the project,
we can certainly hear about
different perspectives.
Is this topic too sensitive
for a certain group of people?
And what are some US issues
that people care about?
What are some world issues
that people care about?
So, again, the project
really helps us diversify
our experience in a sense
that we can interview
different people, but just
within the group itself,
it's already a diversifying experience,
because we can hear
about perspectives from
different members in
a more casual setting,
not a class discussion.
- The advantages of working collectively
to do this project
were definitely all the
different perspectives
that everyone brought to the table.
So even though I said going outside of
the Columbia community
brought a lot of diversity to,
even within the Columbia community,
there still is a lot of
diversity of thought,
and so even though in a classroom setting
we might just have these
pre-prescribed ways
of talking about things,
when the project made
five of us get together
and really talk about the texts,
we really, really delved into
what the texts were saying
and I felt like that taught me way more,
I got way more out of that than
what I've ever really gotten
in a seminar course here at Columbia
in the humanities.
- I think teamwork is,
there's definitely difficulty
to it that isn't there when
you're working on your own,
but it's also something
that is going to be
required no matter what field you go into,
and also to, in your
life you need to know how
to work and interact with other people,
and so I think working collectively
allows you to learn how
to delegate different,
delegate responsibilities
and also give you,
if it's done correctly,
it can be really nice
to have someone else's feedback to work on
and also to divide up the
work so you're doing less work
or doing work that's more
towards your strengths
and it also helps you
to integrate new ideas
into what you're doing that
are different than your own.
Definitely, what I was saying
before, writing a paper
is a very inward process
and it's a lot about you
and your interaction with the text
and Shooting the Core is
all about other interactions
and the outside interactions
and so when you're
working with other people,
it just encourages that even more.
I think the best part of Shooting the Core
was when we were able
to actually interview
people who aren't Columbia students
and hear their interpretations on
some of the same questions that we were
grappling with in class,
because it was cool to see
where they came up with
or brought out points and nuances
that weren't discussed in class
and also what elements stayed the same
throughout the interviews.
And that was definitely an opportunity
that I wouldn't have gotten if I was in
a traditional Contemporary
Civilizations class.
- I would say just two words.
One, I mentioned it before, relevance.
We can really, even through
in class discussion,
we can really relate what we learned
to what we're seeing
in the world right now.
And the second is definitely diversity.
There are two aspects to it.
One is we can hear about
the diverse opinions
from different team members,
and the other is that we
can have the opportunity
to go around the city, interview people
from different races,
different backgrounds,
different beliefs, and really
understand what they think
about what we're studying.
