Students embark on a new Journey this fall
New general education curriculum—Journey: Lipscomb Core—enhances consistent learning outcomes, shared experiences and community building.
By Janel Shoun-Smith | 615-966-7078 |
Perhaps the most all-encompassing work of academic scholarship of the past three years has been the development of Journey: Lipscomb Core, a new general education curriculum intentionally designed to provide consistency in learning outcomes, a shared learning experience and a strong community within the student body.
The curriculum, launching for all incoming students this fall, has been in the works since 2022, when the university launched the Lipscomb Impact 360 strategic plan, with the No. 1 goal to provide a premier, learner-focused Christian education
For three years, the Provost’s Office and faculty have been hard at work developing a core curriculum that not only instills the skills and knowledge most needed in today’s world, but that does it in a way reflective of Lipscomb’s Christ-centered mission.
The faculty’s journey took them from a literature review to gathering information through listening sessions and surveys for all faculty. It required the development of multiple potential curricular models and the creation of the Liberal Arts Core Council. All general education courses had to be either approved or brought into alignment with the new framework and assessed and approved by the council.
“It was a very iterative and communal process,” said Provost Jennifer Shewmaker, who oversaw the entire process which resulted in Journey, a curriculum that takes each Lipscomb student through a 10-step path to life flourishing, studded with four signpost courses: a first-year seminar called Compass, two courses in communication and writing called POWERS and the newly developed capstone course called Virtue, Flourishing and Vocation.
Shewmaker began the process with a review of the latest research and proven best practices recommended by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), a global organization that works to improve quality and equity in undergraduate education.
“We asked the questions, what do we know about how students learn and how we can build this general education program to support their development in key areas,” said Shewmaker. “What are the foundational skills on which we can build career knowledge and skills?”
"As we shaped our approach to general education, we were guided by the AAC&U's Essential Learning Outcomes, which reflect the core competencies needed for success in today’s complex world,” she said. “These include critical and creative thinking, ethical reasoning, effective communication, teamwork and problem-solving. Together, these outcomes provide a strong foundation for students to flourish intellectually, ethically and vocationally."
Through a process of open listening sessions in 2022 and open input sessions in 2023, both involving close to 200 participants, the Provost discovered that Lipscomb’s own faculty valued these same key areas, which are both recommended by AAC&U and highly valued by employers.
According to AAC&U 2021 surveys and Forbes surveys, 95% of employers look for job candidates who can think clearly, solve problems and communicate effectively. Also, 88% of employers look for broad knowledge in the liberal arts and sciences, and 93% say these skills are more important than a candidate’s college major.
But the top job skill employers were looking for in 2024 was communication abilities, and this skill rose to the top of the Lipscomb faculty’s interest as well, said Shewmaker.
“Communication was huge,” she said. “One of the key challenges we heard from the faculty was students’ communication skills.”
The other major take-away from the listening session with faculty was that Lipscomb’s Christian intellectual tradition should be the cornerstone for instilling the key skills in students.
At this point, the framers of Journey began to develop curricular models that would incorporate common learning experiences, as recommended by a strong body of research on high-impact practices in higher education, instill the targeted key skills and incorporate Lipscomb’s Christian intellectual tradition. Multiple models were developed as they were presented, reviewed and revised several times by small groups of faculty key academic stakeholders.
The final model, approved by a vote of all faculty, included a series of common learning experiences within the first–year seminar Compass, a revamped two-course series to teach how classical communication skills can be effectively applied in today’s digital world and a capstone course that takes everything students have learned and looks at it from the lens of ethics and practice in their chosen major.
“This curriculum gives students a consistent experience to develop an understanding of what it means to be a Lipscomb student and to begin to think of their experience as a journey, to ask what does my path look like as I build my skills, build my knowledge and move toward a vocation that God has called me to,” said Shewmaker. “This intentionality around a consistent experience and building community within the class is unique and something that's really special.”
Compass
The first-year seminar, Compass, serves as an invitation to Lipscomb’s scholarly community and an introduction to faculty mentors, and includes nine communal experiences for students, said Shewmaker.
The course has four units, with common assignments for students in each section of the course. Each unit focuses on a question: who am I?, what is truth, what is the good life, and how do I live well?
Nine times throughout the semester, all sections of the course will gather for Compass Point sessions, focused on the themes of the units. At these common sessions, selected faculty will share their knowledge and experiences with students, both introducing students to potential faculty mentors and providing models of critical thinking, creative problem-solving and agile communication focused around the themes of the unit.
“This course is designed to build community within the first-year class, to provide them with a framework to succeed as Christian scholars,” said Shewmaker. “We've also partnered with the Office of Student Life as they developed their first-year experience and the Center for Vocational Development (CVD), which offers first-year programming and coordinates the freshman chapel.”
“We're all partnering to identify the key points during the semester where we need to provide students with certain kinds of support, times when they are asking certain questions, because we know that there is a flow or rhythm to their experience as students.”
POWERS
Because of the great interest in enhancing communication instruction, the development of a new course series to address communication was launched and doubled as Lipscomb’s Quality Enhancement Project (QEP) required for its 2025 re-accreditation process by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.
The POWERS courses prepare students to become confident and effective communicators across multiple platforms. Drawing on the work of rhetoric scholar W. Ross Winterowd and new rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke, faculty developed two courses—Writing to Discover and Communicating to Influence—that reinforce to students that good communication skills should not be siloed from one situation to another.
Over the course of two concurrent courses, students develop writing and communication skills through both classical and digital approaches, are required to transform one idea across three different communication modalities and have the opportunity to participate in extracurricular events such as contests, symposiums and publications.
The idea is to build on the communication strengths the students already possess and show them how those same skills can be used to make an academic argument, to write a professional proposal or to use social media in a civically responsible way, said Brandi Kellett, chair of the English department, associate chair for general education and the QEP director.
“Today students think, ‘what I do on Snapchat has nothing to do with connecting with other people across lines of difference. That's just Snapchat.’ But they will learn that Snapchat communication is actually a rhetorical act, and you're being a responsible citizen in the way you use your ideas to communicate with others, and that matters, especially in a Christian context.”
Virtue, Flourishing and Vocation
The final signpost on the Journey is the Virtue, Flourishing and Vocation course. Taken in a students’ junior or senior year and held in discipline-specific sections, the course will explore how one's discipline or career can be rooted in and informed by Christian virtue and human flourishing with a focus on vocation and ethics.
The course content includes five weeks of bridge curriculum, common to all sections, that reviews what was learned in Lipscomb’s three required Bible courses—Story of Israel, Story of Jesus and Story of Church—and then explores virtue, vocation and flourishing, said JP Conway, assistant professor of Bible and Christian ministry and and chair of undergraduate Bible studies.
“It reminds them of the bigger application of what they learned in their Bible courses,” said Shewmaker. “It asks, ‘What does that mean in your field?’ and leads them into a conversation about ethics in their particular field.”
The rest of the course focuses on applying the six kingdom endowments developed in Amy L. Sherman’s Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society—the good, the true, the beautiful, the just and well-ordered, the sustainable and the prosperous.
“We want students to look at their future profession and consider how they can incorporate at least two of these endowments in their chosen profession,” said Conway, “to consider what are the specifics of carrying out an endowment in their discipline.” Each discipline will choose the best endowments to explore in their section of the capstone course.
The capstone course is “a definitive spiritual bookend” to the CVD vocational programming and freshman chapel offered in a student’s first year, he said.
The Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) awarded Lipscomb University a professional development grant to develop the common bridge curriculum and to train and equip faculty teaching the final 10-week section specific to academic disciplines. A multi-day seminar and working retreat was held in May to expand the vocation-related work.
The Journey
The framing of the general education as a journey toward a Christ-centered vocation and flourishing life is intended to boost students’ investment in their freshman and sophomore studies, said Shewmaker.
“When students enter college thinking of gen ed courses as ‘something to just get out of the way,’ it has no meaning. When things don't have meaning, then we as people don't tend to put much effort into them,” said Shewmaker.
“We also don't tend to integrate that meaningless experience into the rest of our life experience. The new Journey curriculum strives to create meaningful connections for students by saying very explicitly, ‘You are on a path, and along the way you are going to learn these specific things, and those things are going to connect to what you want to do as a career and in life in this specific way.’”
Specific core texts in literature and philosophy have been chosen to use throughout general education class sections, 20 courses have been designated as diverse perspectives courses, early interaction with potential faculty mentors has been incorporated and class-wide research projects are encouraged as early as freshman year.
“This consistency provides the ability to see where our students are doing well and where they are struggling university-wide,” said Shewmaker. “We know what all their learning experiences are so we can measure them all in the same way. We have assessments built into all of these courses in order to target interventions if needed.”
For students, the last step of the journey is graduation, when Shewmaker and faculty hope students will carry the wisdom they have gained through their college experience into their vocation, integrating what they have learned into a flourishing and purposeful life.