University of Southern Maine

Rationale for the Core

The Core curriculum at USM has been designed to provide undergraduates with a general education, a core of skills, and knowledge that every individual needs either to excel in professional life or to build a rich and fulfilling personal life. It is vital that students view the Core as a set of goals, not a checklist of courses. In the wider world, competency counts. The Core is designed to foster those competencies that, by wide agreement, matter the most. It can only succeed, however, where students make the goals of the Core their own.

Note: Resources provided by the Office of Undergraduate Education to assist CAS faculty and departments in planning their participation in the new USM Core Curriculum can be found at www.usm.maine.edu/cas/core.html.

If you have any questions, please contact smcwilms@usm.maine.edu. Additional information about general education at USM may be found at www.usm.maine.edu/gened.

Goals and Structure of the Core

A. The basic competence component of the Core aims to develop essential skills in writing, using quantitative information, and critical thinking. These skills are fundamental tools that are relevant to all other courses that students take. Students should complete all courses relevant to the basic competence component of the Core as early as possible after beginning their studies at USM. Whether a first-year student or a transfer, every student should strive to complete all Core competency requirements by the end of the student's first year at USM.

B. The methods of inquiry/ways of knowing component of the Core aims to develop a broad appreciation of the many ways of looking at and understanding the world that humans have found useful in the current era and in the past. In pursuit of this overriding goal, this component of the Core introduces the student to a wide range of different academic disciplines: their subject matter, their methods, and their broader purposes. This part of the Core curriculum is subdivided into four areas: fine arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

(1) Fine arts courses seek to explore the aesthetic dimension through personal performance and through historical study of the arts.

(2) Through the humanities the Core curriculum seeks to foster knowledge of literature and of the diversity of our historical and cultural heritage. What links these studies together is their focus on the meaning and values of human acts. Under this two-fold division of the humanities, the student develops the critical and aesthetic skills needed to interpret literature and studies the methods through which we attempt to make sense of the past or understand alien cultures

(3) The social sciences aim to acquaint the student with the methods and theories used to study the social, political, or economic behavior of groups or individuals.

(4) Through lecture-laboratory courses, the natural science offerings seek to develop an understanding of scientific methods, theories, and the contribution of a particular science, and of natural science in general, to our understanding of the world.