Warming up
Things are starting to heat up in Fredericton (excuse the pun). I am learning first hand just how sporadic the weather here is. The beginning of last week was cold enough to warrant sweaters and jeans everyday, fall, it seemed was well underway; but no, the last couple days have been scorching at around 30 degrees with high humidity, a shock when you’re wearing a sweater and jeans believe me. Other than the weather, orientation week ended Wednesday and classes have begun to wind up. From the academic orientation and the couple classes I had between Thursday and Friday it looks like it is going to be an interesting, new, exciting and challenging semester.
I won’t try to describe to you what Renaissance College is, partly because I don’t even know what it is yet and partly because it demands a post all its own. I promise a post of some kind on the College soon, but as for understanding the program, the students in their final year at the college haven’t gotten to a general description yet so don’t hold your breath. I would guess that if any description of the Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Leadership at the Renaissance College was to be made it would have to be a very personal one, that’s just how it’s engineered. Just by ways of a general introduction though, my courses are as follows:
Worldviews Cultured and Religions on Mondays.
Integrative Forum: Part I on Tuesdays (This course is designed to bring everything we are learning in all our RC courses to the table for discussion, research and group work.)
Mathematic and Economic approaches to problem solving on Wednesdays
Introduction to Leadership Theories and Concepts on Thursdays
Formative Learning Portfolio I every second Friday (The portfolio is the culmination of every year’s work and the work over our 3 year program. It is a giant exercise in meta-cognition, where we are supposed to formulate and construct our learning from the previous year(s) based on the learning outcomes which form the basis for the College’s education.)
Along with the above courses I have one elective this semester:
Intro. to International Relations on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This course is going to be a real challenge simply because it is so different from what I am used to. It is a large class with the typical university structure, two midterms and a final. The text is interesting but challenging, the first reading which we are to do for tomorrow’s class is by Thomas Hobbes and uses words like hath, equall, and himselfe (no that’s not typos, it’s just language from a really really old scholarly paper). It’s like reading Shakespeare but without the plot or the drama to latch on to. Just dry, three paragraph long sentences with an overzealous use of semi-colons.
The profs (or integrators as they call them) at the College are great, and seem to be truly committed to a great education for their students. What I especially like about the College though are the “textbooks”, which tend to be novels rather than university textbooks. This definitely lends a “real world” feel to the class. Rather than reading something abstract and seemingly without point, the focus is on getting a certain point across in terms and jargon used outside of just the classroom. The text I am reading right now is for my intro to leadership theories and concepts class:
[photopress:leadership_amazon.jpg,full,centered]
It is interesting, I’m not sure if I like it yet; most interesting will be to see what the prof does with it in class.
That’s it for now. More to come soon in the series on beliefs, and something more on Renaissance in the near future as well.
