Faculty members and Penn administrators sat down with The Daily Pennsylvanian to discuss the new pilot courses introduced by the College of Arts and Sciences for first-year students this fall and their role in the broader overhaul of the school's general education curriculum.

Following faculty consensus that general education requirements for the College of Arts and Sciences were outdated, Penn introduced the College Foundations program for a cohort of current first-years. The initiative is part of a planned restructuring of the general education curriculum that will reduce requirements for students, College Dean Peter Struck told the DP.

“I worry a little that it's a little too complicated,” Struck said of the general education requirements. “We‘re testing some ideas right now to try to think about ways we could streamline that.”

The College Foundations courses are the start of a plan to “completely restructure” the general education curriculum and the overall Penn College degree, according to Physics and Astronomy professor Masao Sako, who is teaching the Key class this semester. Though the new model is still in its early stages, it aims to simplify students’ general education requirements. 

“The goal is to give students more freedom — but give them enough scaffolding so that they can at least structure their courses,” Sako said.

The four courses in the College Foundations program — a first-year seminar, a writing seminar, and the “Kite” and “Key” courses, which provide an introduction to the humanities and sciences, respectively — can fulfill six general education requirements and offer an integrated introduction to the subjects they cover.

The new curriculum classifies courses within broad science, social science, or humanities categories and requires a certain number of credits for each. These broader categories aim to allow for the significant expansion of classes that can be counted towards fulfilling these requirements, and allow for students to pursue minors and other interests through them.

“Students will have much more freedom in choosing their classes,” Sako said. “They‘ll have so many more choices and will be able to make their decisions on how they want to choose their electives — even the general education requirements.”

According to Struck, the curriculum will undergo student and faculty consideration for the next two years through the pilot program; the aim for the program‘s formal implementation is Fall 2027.

Struck said that the goals for the new structure were to “encourage exploration,“ make the curriculum “legible,” be able to “manage complexity,” and produce students who are “capable of thinking independently.”

He highlighted the importance of a “breadth of knowledge,” and noted that the general education curriculum is meant to build an intellectual foundation before students specialize in majors. The expansive requirements of the current structure, however, led to students taking foundational courses late into their time at the University.

“Kite and Key was a way of structuring exploration to make sure that students had exposure and background in lots of different ways of approaching both quantitative thinking and qualitative thinking,” Struck said. “Making sure that there was a structured exploration in the first year, so that it could make a difference for students in a choice of major, that‘s really the key.”

Struck expressed his belief that the “best and most profitable way to prepare for your future is to follow your curiosity” and “learn to think broadly.”

“I think that folks who decide in their undergraduate education to pick up just a whole bunch of skills and gather a whole bunch of discrete ways of being able to do things — it‘s an invitation to AI to eat their lunch,” Struck said.

Professor of Philosophy Daniele Lorenzini explained that the Foundations curriculum has been structured around “broad topics that we thought were particularly crucial to the human experience.” He added that the aim was to give students an “idea of the panoply of possibilities they have at Penn.”

Lorenzini also said that faculty favored the more streamlined approach to general education requirements, and added that the College Foundations model provided the opportunity for developing stronger connections between first-year students.

Kevin Platt, a professor of Russian and Eastern European studies who is teaching Kite this semester, added that the challenge of incorporating the wide array of subjects led to the “model of focusing on units which are focusing on concrete universals.”

In terms of curriculum design, Platt said that faculty wanted to “choose things [they] thought everyone should know.” Sako added that the syllabus was a “continuous discussion,” a sentiment which Platt echoed in describing the process as “building the airplane as we fly it.”

Struck also emphasized the importance of “meeting the moment” with the curriculum redesign — pointing to reassessments of the language and writing requirements.

“What the world needed 20 years ago is a little different than what the world needs right now,” Struck said. “We want to make sure that the curriculum and whatever requirements we adopt are suited to the moment that we have now.”

Professor of Political Science Loren Goldman noted that a crucial consideration for Kite and Key was developing a sense of a more unified curriculum for students to undertake.

“Student experience at Penn can sometimes not be unified, right? Because we have different schools, different people doing different things, and there's a real push for professionalization amongst the undergraduates here, in a way that's fairly unique, at least in experiences, [to other] places I've been,” Goldman noted. 

Lorenzini said the Kite and Key courses are designed to provide students with methods they can use to approach various subjects.

Both the humanities-focused Kite and STEM-centric Key courses have associated lab sessions. Platt explained that the humanities laboratory aims to develop the skill of “non-distracted study.” The course sometimes requires students to handwrite in lieu of using a device, which Platt said “allows people to encounter their own intellectual toolkits in different ways.”

“The old-fashioned part is about perennial intellectual skills, which I think are becoming more challenging to teach as a result of the social media and AI environment that we're now inhabiting, but which are absolutely necessary if we're going to build the kinds of independent thinkers, future leaders, flexible professionals who can turn on a dime and take up a new career,” he added.

Kite teaching assistant Marina George meets with students for three hours on Fridays for the screen-free Humanities lab, and described the sessions as a “good place to debrief” the week’s course material, so that students “can speak up in a more seminar-like setting.”

“They've really leaned into it, and the conversations that happen now are so much more organic,” George said. “Being device-free has allowed for a space in which actual conversation and dialogue happen about the material.”

Goldman echoed these remarks, saying that it is “useful for pretty much anybody to think across lines.”

George noted that the amount of time students spend engaging with each other has created a unique atmosphere.

“Students have been able to bond together in a way that I haven’t seen in other classes that I’ve TA’d,” she said. 

Lorenzini added that the shared content within the Kite course enables students to form closer connections with other first years who are “reading some of the same things and studying the same things.”

While the College Foundations program aims to provide students with a diverse background of information, Struck said that students with more focused interests also stand to benefit, since the courses emphasize the process of learning over material itself. 

“The point of the courses is to focus on how knowledge is constructed … so people can be very sophisticated in how they understand knowledge to be constructed, and how they can find their own way into producing knowledge,” he said. 

Platt added that the courses have “been designed to give people a grasp on more fundamental intellectual skills which aren’t going to be taught in some higher level courses.” 

The College Foundations program has received mixed reviews from participants, with some appreciating the introduction to a variety of subjects and others claiming that the program doesn’t serve those who already have a clear idea of what fields they hope to pursue. 

Goldman, however, expressed that while “students think they know what they want to do when they show up,” he hoped that they would consider their education beyond its economic implications and instead focus on making “the college experience a real college experience, not just a pre-professional experience we can achieve.”

“I think the best pre-professional education you can get right now is one that lets you amplify and follow your own curiosity, your own work,” Struck said. “Get yourself ready to be able to adapt and to be able to manage a complex situation, learn from difference — these are things that are key to getting ahead as well as to having the best chance of a lifelong sense of purpose.”

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