Now that LA Gateway-designated courses are appearing in the course schedule, people are asking: What is the LA Gateway? Here’s the philosophical framework, distilled.
About
Curiositas Academic Journal
Journal Information
Curiositas is an academic journal published by the Liberal Arts Gateway program at
Austin Community College
Curiositas was made possible with the support of the Liberal Arts Gateway Research Fellowship.
The Liberal Arts Gateway Program would like to thank Dr. Susan M. Thomason, Associate Vice Chancellor of The Teaching & Learning Excellence Division at ACC, for her support and belief in the transformative power of the liberal arts.
Our Mission
We publish academic work produced by students that demonstrates a unifying vision of the creative and intellectual worlds. These might include critical essays, podcasts, or videos that are academic in scope.
Curiositas accepts from ACC students:
- Academic essays
- Artwork & music related to course materials
- Digital artifacts, such as podcasts, videos, or websites
- Class projects or presentations
The premiere issue of Curiositas was published in April 2023. It is archived and available for reading or download along with all other existing issues here. While our focus is on the liberal arts, we will consider submissions from other disciplines if they meet our Liberal Arts Gateway Principles. You can see an example of the type of work we are looking for below or in archived editions of the journal.
Faculty Leadership
Meet the Curiositas Faculty Leadership Team
Matthew M. Daude
Dean, Liberal Arts: Humanities & Communications
Co-chair, LA Gateway Advisory Committee
mdaude@austincc.edu
Chris Berni
Chair, Liberal Arts Gateway
Professor of English
cberni@austincc.edu
Diane Whitley-Grote
Liberal Arts Gateway Founding Member
Professor of English & Level II Fellow (2021-22)
Alex Watkins
Liberal Arts Gateway
Meet the sponsors of Curiositas.
What is the Liberal Arts Gateway?
Aspiration
The Liberal Arts can save civilization by equipping students to thrive in a pluralistic society through deep engagement in our discipline.
Student-Centered
- Student-centered course designs
- Equity and inclusion build into all facets of the course, from recruitment to materials and assignments and beyond
- Responsiveness to down path stakeholders: What needs will our students face in the next course, the degree plan, transfer institution/employer, career, family, community, and ultimately, The Good Life? Have those needs in mind when you build your course.
LAG Program Links
Liberal Arts Gateway Guiding Principles
PLURALISM
The Liberal Arts celebrate diversity. Pluralism holds that people of different beliefs, experiences, and values all have a voice within a thriving democracy and a thriving classroom. Respecting and exploring many ways of seeing produces the fullest vision.
LITERACIES
The Liberal Arts celebrate all forms of literacy. Linguistic creativity, power, and precision exist within many communities, though certain literacies are culturally dominant and bring access to opportunity and power. A key goal is to investigate how different communities and disciplines think, speak, read, write, and understand evidence.
EVIDENCE
The Liberal Arts celebrate evidence-based thinking as the basis for arriving at fact and truth. Key to the pursuit of truth are research-based inquiry, flexible thinking, awareness of biases, learning from mistakes, and attention to nuance and context.
EQUITY
The Liberal Arts celebrate equity and seek to understand barriers to equity and access in all areas of society. A core goal is the investigation of root causes of inequity and commitment to providing opportunity.
ENGAGEMENT
The Liberal Arts celebrate intellectual curiosity and the pursuit of truth. Students are encouraged to bring their experiences and passions to the classroom. They are encouraged to be open-minded and to focus on exploration and personal growth within a supportive learning environment.
Five P’s of Intellectual Character
Build opportunities to practice these verbs into your course, talk about them explicitly, and model them every class period.
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- Persevere: Don’t give up — in this assignment, in this course, in a conversation, in a line of inquiry, in the pursuit of truth, or in the work of saving civilization.
- Progress: Learn how to gauge progress for yourself — benchmarks, indicators, self-reflection, honesty (with yourself, above all). We stand on the shoulders of giants, but give yourself credit for climbing up there to have a look.
- Produce meaningful intellectual work — and challenge yourself to do better work every next time.
- Promote the fruits of your work to others — both as a courageous attempt to say something true and as an invitation to hear others critique your work.
- Perpetuate these traits, deepen them into habits of mind, and expand them to encompass more and more of your intellectual life.
Liberal Arts Gateway
Manifesto
The mission of the Liberal Arts Gateway is to save civilization by equipping students for productive lives in a pluralistic society. The image of the gateway is a metaphor of our aspiration: Every gateway opens into a pathway.
Avoid trivializing the notion of pathways. We have adopted “pathways” at ACC, and that has largely meant a critique of historic practices leading to relatively superficial changes in the way we shepherd students through our System. For instance, we have published degree maps so we know what course comes next. We have streamlined the admissions process and provided additional enrollment support. We have grouped an impressive number of programs and pathways into ten, intelligible Areas of Study.
Those changes and the wayfinding they provide are useful improvements. But there’s a much grander vision of pathways we could adopt, particularly for the grand mission of the liberal arts. So let’s think bigger — we are after all talking about saving civilization — and ask:
Austin Community College
The Austin Community College District promotes student success and community development by providing affordable access, through traditional and distance learning modes, to higher education and workforce training, including appropriate applied baccalaureate degrees, in its service area.
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6101 Highland Campus Drive
Austin, TX 78752
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Austin, TX 78701
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Austin, TX 78745
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Austin, Texas 78702
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