Cornerstone Initiative for Faculty

Why Teach in Cornerstone?

In Fall 2023, UMass launched the Cornerstone Initiative, aimed at revitalizing the humanities within general education. The Cornerstone classroom prioritizes discussion-based learning in a seminar format, centering around transformative texts. This creates an engaging learning environment, fostering a sense of belonging and intellectual engagement for both students and faculty.

Teaching in Cornerstone fosters collegiality, encouraging faculty to collaborate and share insights across departmental lines, while enhancing the interdisciplinary community at UMass Amherst.

Teaching in Cornerstone also provides a meaningful opportunity to impact first-year students from diverse fields, particularly in STEM and business. It’s a chance to inspire students to enroll in your departmental courses or even minor in your discipline.

How to Teach in Cornerstone?

There are two main ways to teach in Cornerstone:

1. Join an existing Gateway Course faculty team

We invite interested faculty to join one of the existing faculty teams by teaching one of the following Gateway courses:

• HM&FNART 101: Traversing Differences with Critical and Creative Thinking: Local Questions (4 credits, AL, DU)
• HM&FNART 102: Traversing Differences with Critical and Creative Thinking: Global Issues (4 credits, AL, DG)

Faculty teaching a section of the Gateway courses maintain creative freedom in course design but share 50% of common core learning materials (transformative texts) with other sections of their Gateway course and the following objectives:

1. to create a common learning experience for students and faculty that inspires a sense of belonging and intellectual engagement with a community of peers through a curriculum comprised of influential texts and authors;
2. to develop in students a capacity to synthesize different forms of knowledge and information;
3. to equip students with what we are calling narrative leadership skills through the critical and creative analysis of texts;
4. and to instill in students the confidence that their diverse life experiences – formed through racial, ethnic, class, and gendered identities or their intersections – are invaluable to discussion and decision-making, both in the classroom and future workplaces.

2. Propose your existing course as a Pathway course

Pathway Courses offer students the opportunity to explore specific themes: environmental humanities; science and technology and the humanities; business and the humanities; and global studies and the humanities. If you’re already teaching a course that aligns with one of these four thematically organized clusters, consider proposing it as a Pathway Course.

By contributing your course to be listed in the Pathway selection, you will attract a more diverse group of learners to your classroom, benefiting from the interdisciplinary nature of the Cornerstone Initiative.

For more information about teaching in the Cornerstone Program, please reach out via email to minghilleri [at] complit [dot] umass [dot] edu (Moira Inghilleri).