The Engaged Citizen is a one-semester course required of
all first year students entering Hendrix College. The theme of the “engaged
citizen” combines the spirit of Hendrix’s Odyssey program with the college’s
stated purpose of preparing “its graduates for lives of service and fulfillment
in their communities and the world.” From philosophers and physicists to
artists and anthropologists, we all approach questions about what it means to
be involved in our communities, whether locally or globally, in different ways.
This course seeks to illuminate the multiplicity of possible interpretations of
engaging as a citizen through interdisciplinary team teaching, in which pairs
of faculty from across the institution come together to form dyads and explore
a sub-topic from different methodological "ways of knowing." The
varying disciplinary and individual approaches to this theme are intended to
provoke discussion and reflection on this topic both within the dyads and
throughout the Hendrix community.
The
students divide their time equally between the two dyad professors over the
course of the semester. The dyads can also meet periodically as a combined
group if the professors deem it appropriate. The course includes an engaged
learning component, involving an introductory, hands‑on activity that engages
academic material in or outside the classroom and is tied to the content of the
course.