Curriculum Transformation Current & Past Projects

Explore past and present examples of Curriculum Transformation Projects.

2023–24 Academic Year Projects

As part of the VPUE Leveling the Learning Landscape (L3) initiative, CTL hosted the first-ever Curriculum Transformation Institute, June 13–15, 2023.

From the 21 applications to participate in the institute, the L3 Curriculum, Equity, and Innovation working group selected a multi-disciplinary cohort of six teams, who met together in June to develop full proposals, with coaching and input from CTL, as well as cross-team feedback. 

All six teams successfully developed full proposals and are carrying out curriculum change projects beginning in the 2023–24 academic year. Teams include faculty, academic teaching staff, non-teaching staff, and students. 

Project summaries

• The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) will create a new four-course introductory curriculum and pathway into the five interdisciplinary majors within CCSRE. They also aim to build competency in core concepts and community among students and instructors.
• Chemistry will create a new course, Chem 11, to be offered in spring quarter as a new “on-ramp” course leading into Chem 31A/B the following fall and winter. Chem 11 builds on Math 18 and 19, and will incorporate the successful STEMentors model from the Chem 31 sequence.
• A cross-disciplinary group from Humanities and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability will design and implement an introductory Environmental Humanities curriculum, which will be designed to enrich the exposure of a wide range of students to various scholarly approaches and diverse academic, cultural, and identity-based perspectives that can bring insight and value to environmental problem-solving.
• Physics will revise the existing Physics 41 course, as well as create an alternative course, Physics 41E, to be better designed for a wide range of prior experiences for Stanford students beginning a Physics course sequence here. They also plan to make the 40 series more welcoming as a starting point for Physics majors, who have more often started in the Physics 61, 71, 81 series of courses. 
• Statistics is creating two new courses, Stats 117 and 118, which will address concepts currently in Stats 116 at a more helpful pace for learning over two quarters, as well as make the courses more modular and accessible to better lead into a wide variety of majors and student interests.
• A team from across programs and departments in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability will design and pilot shared curricular and teaching approaches to inclusive field educational experiences, which will be incorporated into multiple courses.

2024–2025 Academic Year Projects

• Bioengineering will revise three key courses in the introductory curriculum: BIOE42, BIOE44, and BIOE80. They aim to improve quantitative competency of BIOE graduating students, while maintaining or improving student accessibility to the major.
• Officially launched on January 1, 2024, the Department of African and African American Studies (DAAAS) will weave experiential learning, community engagement, multidisciplinary research methods, and external learning expeditions into their new introductory curriculum. Also part of their project is soliciting regular student feedback on curricular developments, including from the two student members of their project team.
• Human Biology will analyze student data from the introductory core course HumBio 2A and on that basis adopt a multi-pronged approach to reducing student learning and achievement gaps in the course. Possibilities include redesigning elements of HumBio 2A, adding student learning assistants to the course staff, and designing a new companion course for students with little prior exposure to course topics and skills.