Building an Academic Career:
Requirements, Policies and
Special Opportunities

Earlham's General Education Program

General Education Requirements

First-Year Courses

Interpretive Practices courses teach first-year students general methods of interpretation in reading, writing and classroom discussion that provide a basis for skills they will continue to develop throughout their college career at Earlham and throughout their lives. Students choose among topics and are expected to:

  • Sharpen interpretive reading skills for analyzing and interpreting different kinds of texts.

  • Strengthen general skills required for coherence and clarity in written expression.

  • Communicate intelligently and effectively both in writing and through participation in group discussion.

  • Become better, more constructive and more open-minded listeners.

  • Develop skills that support and enhance life-long learning and engaged, committed citizenship.

The Earlham Seminar engages first-year students in exploring a topic of interest in an intimate, challenging and collaborative learning environment. These seminars introduce students to active and successful participation in a learning community and encourage students to find new ways to engage and understand the world. Earlham Seminars share these distinctive characteristics:

  • Investigation of a topic and a set of related questions, using multiple ways of knowing, in order to examine intentionally how knowledge is constructed.

  • Grounding in an academic discipline while examining issues from an interdisciplinary scope.

  • Readings that engage a range of perspectives, discourses and values.

  • Emphasis on reading, reflection, writing and oral communication skills, and providing opportunities for students to critique and analyze information, construct arguments, listen interpretively and demonstrate an understanding of various perspectives.

  • Encouragement of personal creativity and confidence in ideas and the development of cooperative learning and research skills.

Comparative Practices courses are taken after Interpretive Practices and/or the Earlham Seminar and may be disciplinary or interdisciplinary. They are reading- and writing-intensive courses that examine a diverse range of texts arranged around a particular question, theme or historical period. In this context, the term texts may include films, musical scores or works of art. The purpose is to foreground texts for the study of a subject and to compare texts while approaching them from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and in several contexts. Comparative Practices courses:

  • Provide a writing- and reading- intensive experience that develops further the skills acquired in Interpretive Practices courses.

  • Study an array of challenging texts arranged around a particular question, theme or historical period.

  • Investigate primary and secondary texts in studying an issue or era.

  • Compare texts in several contexts — historical, social, political — and put them in dialog with one another.