Vision:
The diverse educational communities of a comprehensive university have a common interest in liberal learning. Liberal learning nurtures each student’s capability for transforming human culture and complements professional and vocational pathways. Liberal education involves acquiring fundamental intellectual skills; becoming conversant with a variety of human ideas, cultural perspectives, and conceptual frameworks; and developing habits of ethical reflecting and acting in an interdependent world. This vision of General Education enables Belmont University to achieve its vision to be a premier teaching university, bringing together the best of liberal arts and professional education in a Christian community of learning and service.
Purpose:
General Education at Belmont University fosters the skills, knowledge, perspectives, values, and dispositions that will enable students to apply their understandings and abilities beyond the classroom, encouraging them to become responsibly engaged in their community and in the world.
Values:
These values will be infused throughout the courses in the General Education curriculum and pursued through a wide variety of active learning experiences, all of which seek to meet the learning goals delineated below:
- The importance of life-long intellectual growth and development;
- The importance of moral values and personal commitments;
- The importance of the application of classroom learning to the "real world";
- The importance of extending the boundaries of learning beyond the classroom.
- A Message from the Director
Dear Students and Prospective Students,
The BELL Core (shorthand for The Belmont Experience: Learning for Life) is Belmont University’s general education program, the common liberal arts core that constitutes over a third of a Belmont degree. While you will learn about the liberal arts tradition underpinning the program in First-Year Seminar, and you will learn all the details of your degree requirements from your advisor, a couple of points here quickly give the general picture.
The BELL Core is rooted in an over two-thousand year old tradition of liberal education; to understand the BELL Core is to understand liberal education. One way to summarize a liberal education is by its content: liberal education is a broad-based education in which students have at least a basic familiarity with the most important discoveries, ideas, and contributions of the various academic disciplines. It is a general education, with elements across the arts and sciences. Another way to summarize a liberal education is in terms of the impact it has on students: liberally educated people are curious, deliberative, well-informed, open-minded, and rational. They know how to integrate new information, forming sound judgments regarding its significance. Liberally educated read well (and a lot); they communicate effectively in both speech and writing - even across cultural boundaries.
Just as there is more to life than a professional career, there is more to an education than professional preparation. The BELL Core plays a central role in Belmont’s commitment to educate the whole person. You will be a better neighbor, especially in an increasingly diverse society, if you are familiar with cultural practices and ways of life different than your own. You will be a better media consumer if you know how to sort ideological ranting from reasoned analysis. You will be a better citizen if you understand the science, history, and religion needed to take an informed position. You will be a better a parent if you understand the psychology of human development. You will be a better spouse if you learn how to engage passionate and civil disagreement, giving good reasons for the statements you make, adjusting your position in light of cogent points made on the other side. The knowledge and skills learned in the BELL Core will positively impact every aspect of your life.
A liberal education is also be immensely valuable in any profession you might pursue. You will be a better music industry executive if you study a foreign language, take courses in cross cultural psychology, and become adept at working and thinking across cultural divides. You will be a better nurse if you have studied theology and understand the ways in which human beings respond spiritually to suffering and death. You will be a better pharmacist if you have studied political science and understand how public policy decisions lead to differential access to health care. Effective communication skills are indispensable and adaptable in any professional context, as is the ability to integrate new and technical information.
Even with all of that, I think the greatest value in liberal education is harder to articulate. We are profoundly curious creatures, and liberal learning speaks directly to our nature as human beings. As Aristotle famously pointed out, from the beginning of our lives we take joy in using our senses to explore the world. There is a need, deep in our souls, to understand how the world works, and what our place in the world is and ought to be. Emerging directly from our curious nature, the bedrock of our civilization can be thought of as an unfolding conversation, encompassing the best of what has been thought and said, that began in various ancient locations and continues - primary among a precious few places in our culture - in the halls of today’s universities. The BELL Core is your ticket into the conversation, a means to claim your intellectual heritage, to listen to the great voices and ideas across time, and even to make your own contribution to the conversation.
Liberal learning is hard work, but it is also deeply joyous. Study hard, but have fun. Wonder. Wander. Explore. Learn cool stuff. Be fascinated. Get your mind blown. And you will be able to use the BELL Core to reveal more of the beauty, awe, tragedy, and complexity of the world we all share. And while the world is becoming more interesting to you, you will also be accomplishing something far greater: you will become both more interesting and more useful to the world as well.
Sincerely,
Noel
- BELL Core Learning Outcomes
Connecting Disciplines
The BELL Core engages students in a range of individual disciplines including humanities, social sciences, sciences, arts, quantitative reasoning, religion, and wellness. Students learn how to recognize the connections among disciplines and they develop an integrated, contextualized understanding of the world around them.
Communication
The BELL Core seeks to develop the writing, speaking, listening, and presenting skills of our students. Students learn how to effectively communicate complex and interesting ideas in ways that are compelling, substantive, and persuasive.
Collaboration
The BELL Core encourages students to learn, grow, and support each other as a team members. Students learn how to solve problems through collaboration, bringing contributions of diverse peers together toward a solution.
Critical Thinking
BELL Core students will pose meaningful questions and seek imaginative answers using evidence-based reasoning to solve complex problems and contribute new knowledge to the world. Students learn how to critically evaluate knowledge claims, and competing sets of evidence, toward forming their own reasoned conclusions.
Citizenship
The BELL Core encourages students to act as ethical citizens by increasing their cultural knowledge and social understanding. Students learn how to consider various points of views, think deeply about public values, and engage in civil discourse across even passioned disagreement.