By Kate Rix
An undergraduate who takes classes in African theater, engineering ethics, feminist jurisprudence, and the sociology of poverty may appear to be grazing at the banquet of university course offerings — or they might be following an innovative program called Course Threads, a flexible roadmap of the intellectual links between departments and disciplines.
Course Threads is a unique Berkeley initiative to help students find connections among academic subjects. Developed at the Townsend Center for the Humanities with support from the Mellon Foundation, the approach offers a flexible but coherent way for students to explore intellectual themes as they wind their way through the departments on campus.
“We remember those moments when, completely unplanned as a student, we realized that this idea over here is connected to that idea over there,” says Anthony Cascardi, professor of rhetoric, comparative literature and Spanish and director of the Townsend Center. “The connections are surprising. These are moments when we realized that the ideas and questions we were studying are hanging together in unexpected ways.”
Following a course thread does not replace declaring a major or minor. The student taking courses in African theater and engineering ethics, for example, would be following the human rights course thread, but will also have declared a major in history, mathematics, or any number of other degree programs.
“If we use it right, the Course Threads program will allow us to break down the intellectual silos that we work and study in,” says Professor Thomas Laqueur, who teaches history and was involved in developing the human rights course thread. “It will allow students to think about questions broadly. There are a lot of disciplinary boundaries but some very common questions. This will let students put together coherent ways of thinking about those questions.”
So far, six Threads have been prepared and a number of others are in development.
Cultural Forms in Transit examines what happens when cultures move across national or geographical borders. Courses include “The Southern Border,” ”Global Poverty,” “American Cyber Cultures,” and “Buddhism on the Silk Road.”
Historical and Modern Cities examines urban cultures ranging from ancient Rome to contemporary Chinese cities, using the varied perspectives of city planning, anthropology, literary studies, and architecture.
Students following a thread for Visible Language might travel from a course in the linguistics department on writing systems to an offering in the School of Education on literacy.
Courses in the Human Rights thread can help students pursue study of the legal, historical, political, economic and psychological dynamics of human rights.
The new thread in Human-Centered Design will examine elements of design beginning with objects and how they function but which lead quickly to questions of economics, justice and philosophy. Courses in this thread span disciplines from history to engineering and architecture.
Also recently developed, the thread in Humanities and the Environment connects students to courses that reflect on the ways humans imagine, represent, interact and change within the natural world. Disciplines included in this thread include literature, anthropology, East Asian studies, environmental design, and art history.
Each course thread has developed in its own way. To help prepare the Human Rights thread, faculty worked with undergraduate research apprentices who interviewed dozens of instructors across campus to develop a conceptual inventory of courses that span departments and disciplines.
The idea for the Cultural Forms in Transit thread emerged as the Townsend Center was developing the Course Threads program. Having heard anthropology professor Charles Briggs and professor of German Deniz Gökturk separately mention concepts they were exploring — but which seemed complementary —Anthony Cascardi suggested that the faculty meet.
“We started working together, using different analytical tools, but having read lots of the same material,” says Briggs, “and we thought that if two of us were working on these ideas, then who else on campus might be addressing the same questions?”
Briggs and Gökturk share an interest in migration and various ways that cultural traditions are represented and marketed to both global and local audiences. Briggs is part of an international working group called “Form and Value in Globalized Traditions” and Gökturk has assembled a research group around questions of migration, citizenship and multiculturalism. Together, their interests have formed a thread of courses across disciplines to examine memory, ethnicity and cultural identity.
“Our thread emerged as part of a conversation between faculty that we developed while the Townsend Center was shaping the processes of connecting themes,” Briggs says. “We wanted to make those connections available to students.”
Meanwhile, the Course Threads initiative had refined its digital tools to support interdisciplinary faculty connections, communication and sharing of materials. Through the Center’s website, faculty can share events calendars, upload video, collaborate on writing and make comments on projects.
Like human rights, developing the visible language thread involved undergraduate research. At its core, the thread follows questions about literacy, both in contemporary and ancient cultures. Guiding concepts for this thread include the history of writing, musical notation and the effect of technology on literacy.
“The undergraduate research apprentices gave us an invaluable set of student perspectives, so the threads wouldn’t be too removed from student reality,” says Rick Kern, professor of French and director of the Berkeley Language Center. “At the undergraduate level, I think students do follow their interests, but not necessarily very systematically when it comes to electives, and the course threads project is intended to help them make their choices more systematic and coherent, so they have a clearer sense of how things they’ve learned from their various courses fit together.”
The approach promises to yield fruit for faculty as well as students. In the process of building the Humanities and the Environment thread, Robert Hass, poet and professor of English, says that some basic questions have emerged.
“What belongs to the hard sciences, to the social sciences and to the humanities?” asks Hass, who co-teaches an introduction to environmental studies course. “How do we broadly define ‘environmental’ interest? The course threads project, I think, is a way of helping students navigate the possibilities and pursue their interests.”
