Discovery Program (Core Curriculum Requirement)

 

 

When we discover what we had not before known, we experience wonder. When Keats first read Homer, he felt “like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.”  The Discovery Program, like Homer to Keats, serves as the beginning of a great journey of learning and teaching that students and faculty take together.

When we learn and teach in Discovery, we take four questions as our common ground: How do we know the world? What questions and what tools shape our knowledge? How do we determine what we value? How do our different perspectives—intellectual and personal—inform each other?

Professors in Discovery have a common mission: to help students from all departments and programs understand better the organization of knowledge in the modern world. Faculty are responsible not only to colleagues and students in their own disciplines, but also to others learning and teaching in the program from across the University’s variegated intellectual terrain.

Students, too, have a common mission: to claim their own educations with curiosity, open mindedness, and discipline. They are responsible for active and tangible engagement in the intellectual life of the University, in classrooms, on campus, and within the wider community. Students are partners in the learning process. Together, students and faculty seek to understand the world as it is and as it might be, and to take their places as independent thinkers in the world they will help to shape.

The Discovery Program provides the intellectual framework for students in any major. It represents the faculty’s collective belief in what constitutes and contributes to essential knowledge of the world.  Together, students and faculty attempt to understand fully and use ethically that knowledge, both in the present and as a reservoir from which to draw in the future.

Each course in the Discovery Program fulfills an obligation not only to its own field, but also to others. Individually, courses illuminate the disciplines and ask that students understand their foundational methods, tools, and questions. Collectively, the Discovery Program aspires to help students recognize complexity and elegance in the relationships among the disciplines, to chart constellations of human knowledge.  Like Keats, we are “watchers of the skies.”

“He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” Confucius.

 

(Undergraduate Catalogue of the University of New Hampshire)