Updated: March 2003
One of the initial projects that the Center of Inquiry committed to support is a pilot project offering the college's common curriculum course, "Cultures and Traditions" (more typically called simply "C&T") to Wabash staff and community members. This pilot project has been dubbed the "C&T for Staff" project.. The following is an overview of the background of this pilot project and the accompanying research project designed to assess its accomplishments, as of March 2003. This report will be updated periodically.
Abstract
"C&T for Staff" is a pilot project offering the Wabash College core course ("Cultures and Traditions") to College staff and community members. First offered in the 2001-2002 school year, it will complete its fourth semester in May, 2003. Participants in the first year of the course were interviewed in the Summer of 2002 as part of an accompanying research project, and participants in the second year will be interviewed upon the completion of the current semester.
The aims of this research are fourfold: first, to provide assessment and documentation of the effectiveness and value of this course, both for individuals who participated and for the college community; second, to seek participants' perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of the course, so that it could be improved in subsequent iterations; third, to develop a low-cost, easy-to-coordinate model that could be emulated at other campuses, and finally, to discover what participants' experiences in this course can tell us about the importance of the liberal arts. Most striking in this area is the importance that people place on intellectual life, and the difficulty that they typically have in meeting their intellectual needs.
This report addresses three topics: first, background about the C&T course at Wabash and the development of the "C&T for Staff" course; second, a review of the methodology and some of the preliminary findings of the research project; and third, a more detailed presentation of the logistics of the "C&T for Staff" course.
The full report 
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