ABSTRACT

For the past four decades, predominantly white colleges and universities throughout the United States have adopted diversity curricular requirements. While evidence suggests these courses yield positive outcomes for students, scholars have less often addressed the process of curricular change toward creating the requirements. Further, colleges have begun to update or supplement diversity requirements enacted in past decades, but this process has not been sufficiently studied. The curricular change process at a private, highly selective liberal arts college in the South offers an instructive case study of how organizational culture informed the implementation of a new social justice course requirement for all undergraduate students. It also offers a rare study of a college with an existing diversity requirement whose faculty approved a second requirement focused on social justice, as colleges may seek to revisit existing requirements after implementation. We draw upon interviews with faculty and institutional documents to question whether the new social justice requirement represented transformational change—or functioned as window-dressing that updated outdated language but ultimately maintained existing curricular arrangements.

摘要

在过去的四年中，美国以白人为主的学院和大学都采用了多元化的课程要求。虽然有证据表明这些课程为学生带来了积极的成果，但学者们很少讨论课程改革以创造要求的过程。此外，大学已经开始更新或补充过去几十年制定的多样性要求，但这一过程尚未得到充分研究。南方一所私立、高选择性文理学院的课程变革过程提供了一个有启发性的案例研究，说明组织文化如何为所有本科生实施新的社会正义课程要求提供信息。它还对具有现有多样性要求的大学进行了一项罕见的研究，该大学的教职员工批准了关注社会正义的第二项要求，因为大学可能会在实施后寻求重新审视现有要求。我们利用对教职员工和机构文件的采访来质疑新的社会正义要求是否代表了转型变革——或者起到了更新过时语言但最终保持现有课程安排的装饰作用。