The Curriculum and Faculty Development Network

Launched in 1993, the Curriculum and Faculty Development Network linked more than 100 institutions that worked to rethink the curriculum to provide ample opportunities for students to consider complex, critical questions about American pluralism. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the network supported summer institutes, national workshops on faculty development, campus-based initiatives, and electronic networks.

Boundaries and Borderlands I, II, and III: The Search for Recognition and Community in America

At the heart of the Curriculum and Faculty Development Network was a series of ten-day summer institutes entitled Boundaries and Borderlands. Each institute offered a team of faculty and administrators from institutions across the country the opportunity to intensively study readings from the scholarship of diversity and democracy in order to re-frame general education courses. The three ten-day summer institutes introduced several hundred faculty to new scholarship on diversity and democracy.

The title, “Boundaries and Borderlands,” delineates twin concepts that are at the core of the dilemma in a diverse democracy. Boundaries suggest limits chosen and imposed, necessary and falsely constructed, that nonetheless are the terrain in which democratic pluralism is enacted. Borderlands suggest those spaces between or at the edges of intersecting boundaries, a kind of liminal space where it may be possible, periodically, to achieve some common ground.

Below are the dates of the Boundaries and Borderlands Summer Institutes:

• Boundaries and Borderlands I: July 29-August 7, 1994, Williams College
• Boundaries and Borderlands II: July 20-30, 1995, Williams College
• Boundaries and Borderlands III: July 13-23, 2000, Brown University

Organizing Questions for the Institutes:

• What must we know and understand about the multiplicity of groups and people that have been unequally acknowledged in our nation?
• What democratic concepts can we draw on from our own U.S. history to guide us in forging new civic covenants among our citizens?
• How are we to understand the contradictory interconnections between democratic aspiration and structural injustice?
• What kinds of intercultural competencies will graduates need to negotiate their disparate and multiple commitments and communities, inherited and adopted?
• What kinds of knowledge and capabilities are required for full participation in a pluralist democracy? What kind of values?
• What are the crucial distinctions between recognizing/acknowledging difference and learning to take grounded stands in the face of learning, how can students develop both kinds of capabilities over time?

The intellectual core of the institute—designed to create a learning community most conducive to encourage open discussion—was a series of eight three-hour morning seminars, each of which was organized around a different thematic set of readings. The themes of the seminars were:

• Education: The Making of Citizens
• The U.S. Democratic Experiment: Forging a Nation for Whom?
• Difference and Democracy: Theoretical Frameworks
• Race and Racialization: The Color of Democracy
• Women, Democracy, and Citizenship
• Immigration: Patterns, Politics, and Experience
• Religious Diversity and Freedom in a Liberal Democracy
• The Limits and Promise of Community in a Multicultural America

Participants engaged in sustained study of the latest scholarship on diversity, examined curricular models being developed at institutions across the country, learned the latest research on the impact of diversity of student learning, and developed skills in fostering intergroup dialogue and learning. The institute also provided workshops on classroom pedagogies to enhance a climate of engagement, collaborative programming across academic and student affairs, and programs that engage students directly in the wider community.