At its May 2011 meeting, the Board of Trustees adopted a statement of Mission, Vision, and Values for to guide the Strategic Planning process at Trinity University.  The vision for Trinity is to “define the new liberal arts experience.”  The first step in moving us towards that vision is to “create a leading edge liberal arts and sciences curriculum to define the new liberal arts, integrating professional and pre-professional programs, striving for excellence in faculty research, and enabling productive collisions among different disciplines” (objective 1 of the strategic plan).

To help us start this visioning process, Trinity will be sponsoring a symposium of innovative thinkers in the liberal arts from across the country, as well as a series of discussions, both virtual and on-campus, to support this symposium.  Trinity has received support from The Andrew F. Mellon Foundation to apply for funding to launch the process of curricular design.

Following the symposium Trinity will hold an all-campus retreat to envision future Trinity graduates of 2022 and how their education has formed their thinking and experiences.  These conversations supported the Ideas Lab in January 2012.

In March 2012, the participants in the Curricular Design Lab.  Feedback on the model will be solicited through the end of the Spring 2012 semester.  A faculty committee continued to develop this draft - in light of received feedback and continued research - in the Summer of 2012. The committee will share their draft with the faculty in September 2012 and continue to collect feedback and impressions on the direction of th proposed curricular revisions throughout the fall 2012 semester.

As the table on the process of Curricular Review and Development indicates, the comments from the retreat will serve as the basis for several curricular models, which will be refined after the opportunity for comments, and the revised models will then voted on by the faculty at a special faculty meeting. Subcommittees, appointed by the Strategic Planning Committee, will be examining the opportunities presented by the objectives of the strategic planning process, and will work in tandem with the curricular review process to consider the role of those objectives in the education of a Trinity student.

The process of re-envisioning something as complex as a curriculum is necessarily long and involved.  This multi-year discussion will envision what a Trinity education might look like, develop ideas for how we could achieve this vision, iterate on those ideas, and develop them into a broad structure for a Trinity curriculum.  This discussion includes, but is much broader than, the General Education portion of the curriculum at Trinity.  The goal is to create an educational experience, both inside and outside of the classroom, that will prepare our students to be thoughtful and effective citizens, in the broadest sense, of the world they will inhabit.