Our essential education curriculum is designed to prepare students for a life of inquiry, analysis, discovery, problem solving, effective communication, and innovation.
Graceland’s essential education is designed for students and faculty to engage the “big questions” and far-reaching issues – contemporary and enduring – in science and society, cultures and values, global interdependence, the changing economy, and human dignity and freedom.
This curriculum seeks to connect knowledge with choices and action and seeks to prepare students for citizenship and work through engaged and guided learning on “real-world” problems.
The curriculum is also designed to foster civic, intercultural and ethical learning, emphasizing personal and social responsibility and a commitment to transformational justice.
The new curriculum seeks to engage the “big questions” by focusing on three specific themes. Students may choose to complete their essential education requirements by focusing on one of the curriculum’s three themes.
Graceland University faculty have endorsed the Essential Learning Outcomes developed by Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) as a document that would inform the direction of this new curriculum, and LEAP’s “Principles of Excellence” are also reflected and embodied in this curriculum.
While the new essential education curriculum was put in place to replace the existing general education requirements, essential education is designed to be something students will encounter across the university, both inside and outside the classroom.
About Essential Education
Graceland's essential education allows students to experience their liberal arts education in a new way, offering three themes that students can choose from, giving them the ability to study a specific area of interest, which developing their critical thinking, communication, and other essential skills.
Examine humanity’s fundamental equality, and the historical and contemporary forces that impede equality and privilege certain groups. This theme addresses peace as “an end to all forms of personal and structural violence, rooted in a just and sustainable society."
Explore Equality And Peace Theme
Examine the role of innovation from a historical and/or futuristic perspective to see how social, economic, political or technological development can change society.
Explore Innovation Theme
Examine the concept of sustainability from human, social, economic, and environmental perspectives. Sustainability is broadly conceived here as the endurance of systems and processes.
Explore Sustainability Theme
“What makes our approach to a student’s core curriculum so radical is a shift to understanding that the core is essential education. These are the skills that employers are clamoring for in college graduates.”
– Brian White, PhD, Dean, Humanities, Visual and Performing Arts
Graceland’s essential education curriculum is designed to prepare students for a life of inquiry, analysis, discovery, problem solving, effective communication and innovation.
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) identify what a student should know or be able to do as a result of completing a particular course of study. Graceland’s essential education curriculum has six Student Learning Outcomes:
Graceland’s essential education curriculum has three themes:
Each of the three themes has courses in its curriculum unique to that theme. Visit the academic catalog for more information and a complete list of the courses by theme.
Visit the Essential Education Curriculum by Theme page for a complete list of the courses by theme.
Yes.
If you complete one of the essential education themes, your transcript will include the following notation, “Concentration: Essential Education Curriculum (name of theme, e.g. Sustainability) Theme.”
New students will learn about the themes as they go through the orientation and registration process, in their INTD1100 Critical Thinking in the Liberal Arts and Sciences course, and from material that is available on this website and from academic advisors. Students will be able to request a theme in their INTD1100 class.
Students need to complete at least four (4) theme-based courses chosen from a single essential education curriculum theme.
The essential education curriculum is different from the old general education curriculum in three important ways:
College courses that you have taken in high school or at other colleges may count toward your essential education requirements.
The transfer policy outlines the process Graceland uses to determine what transfer courses will meet essential education requirements. If you have questions about this policy, please contact your academic advisor, the Student Success Studio or the Registrar’s Office.
Essential education requirements follow students with transfer credits when entering Graceland University.
Essential education applies to all undergraduate students entering Graceland beginning with the 2017-18 academic year. The specific requirements will vary depending upon the number of semester credit hours you earned prior to coming to Graceland.
Graceland’s General Education Committee spent the 2014-15 academic year studying the existing general education curriculum to determine the extent to which it was meeting the needs of students. This included a faculty survey that examined what faculty believed students most needed to learn and the extent to which the core curriculum was designed to help students in those areas. Employer surveys were studied to learn more about employer expectations. When the idea of the themes emerged, students were surveyed to assess their level of interest. The recommendation that emerged from this process was that a revised general education package was needed.
The Committee then spent the 2015-16 academic year designing the new curriculum. The faculty chose to endorse the Essential Learning Outcomes developed by the Association of America’s Colleges and Universities’ LEAP (Liberal Education and America’s Promise) initiative, and the committee sought to incorporate LEAP’s Principles of Excellence into the new curriculum. Additional information about LEAP’s Essential Learning Outcomes is available at:
The essential education curriculum is 39 credits:
| Student Learning Outcomes | # OF S.H. Credits Required |
|---|---|
| Communication | 9 s.h. |
| Critical Thinking | 3 s.h. |
| Ethical Thinking and Action | 3 s.h. |
| Global Learning | 3 s.h. |
| Knowledge of Human Cultures | Total of 12 s.h.
|
| Knowledge of the Physical and Natural World | Total of 9 s.h.
|
The new essential education requires six fewer semester hour credits than the current general education curriculum.
Yes. The idea behind essential education is that there are essential skills that successful graduates need to develop, and those skills can be developed both in and out of the classroom where their importance will be stressed in a wide range of places.
Yes, absolutely!
Yes. Students who entered Graceland before the 2017-18 academic year may choose to complete their general education requirements using the essential education curriculum. However, they are also free to complete the general education requirements that existed when they came to Graceland.
You may talk to your academic advisor or the Registrar’s Office.
Yes, some of the courses that are part of the new essential education curriculum are offered both face-to-face and online.
