Teaching & Curriculum

When I came for an interview, that experience reinforced something that I had hoped would be here, which is that the University thinks deeply about its curriculum. And so I inherited a Blue Ribbon Commission on Undergraduate Studies and was very impressed by the level of thinking and the way in which it had connected with key pedagogic developments around the world and brought that together into a coherent package, and then developed a curriculum that was based on three pillars—the disciplinary curriculum, the core curriculum and the co-curriculum. And Durham professed to have a holistic approach to Education and essentially the way that was delivered was to have a disciplinary curriculum essentially and nothing else. And then what we called the wider student experience, which was located in colleges, but we did not design the interface elements. We left the two in parallel and then students designed and connected the two themselves. There was not any kind of purposeful design behind it. What I really liked at SMU was this sense of purposeful design.