Dr. Neiwert is doing the work she “always wanted to do” as Core Director
By Skylar Mattson
As a part of their education at St. Kate’s, every student in the College For Women will take 32 credits that make up what is called the LIFE Core. These 32 credits consist of the two classes unique to a St. Kate’s undergraduate education, The Reflective Woman (TRW) and Global Search For Justice (GSJ), and six distribution requirements made up of a variety of classes from some different areas in the traditional liberal arts and sciences disciplines that tend to not be specific to a student’s major.
In January, Dr. Rachel Neiwert stepped into the CORE Director role and she shared with me how in this position, she is doing the work that “I always wanted to do here at St. Kate’s.”
Although new to the CORE Director position, Dr. Neiwert’s 14 years of teaching at St. Kate’s make it so she is by no means new to the university. She started out teaching European history and quickly began regularly teaching TRW. Beyond teaching and directing the Core, she participates in collaborative research on the Welcoming The Dear Neighbor project and chairs multiple departments, including History, Philosophy, Theology, Art, Art History and Literature, Language and Writing.
With so much on her plate already, one may wonder what would cause Dr. Neiwert to take on as big of a role as being the Core Director. She explained, “I went to a liberal arts college like St. Kate’s. I feel like my life has been spent swimming in this sea of the liberal arts, and I love everything about it. To have the opportunity to get to dream a little bit about what the Core could be and to help the Core be the best that it can be is such a joy to me.”
Dr. Neiwert explained that her role requires her to do some nitty gritty things like scheduling and staffing TRW and GSJ classes, but it also provides her the opportunity to be a bit visionary. Across the GSJ and TRW classes, she aims to find methods to teach students to be critical and creative readers and pull out the pieces of the courses that make them common courses even though they are taught by many instructors. In this work, she works closely with her dean and the provost.
With the signature core courses being taught by multiple instructors, students have been raising concerns about differing levels of difficulty and workloads arising. When asked if there are plans to address this, Dr. Neiwert explained, “I think it happens sort of almost by accident. I don’t think it’s that someone sits in their office and says, ‘I just want to make my class way harder than everybody else’s.’ I think that as faculty, particularly faculty teaching TRW and GSJ, we all come from different backgrounds, and all of our different backgrounds have different ways that we understand what makes up a course. And so, sometimes the difference is a reflection of different backgrounds. I do think it’s the case that, as Core Director, I need to do more work to help faculty think about the common elements across our courses, and that is work that’s in the process.”
Beyond streamlining the signature core courses for consistency, Dr. Neiwert shared that she and a group of faculty are giving much attention to GSJ. “I have a group of faculty that I’m working with right now who are going to teach three pilot sections of GSJ in the Spring Semester that will pilot a revised curriculum in GSJ that honors the spirit of the original GSJ, but also thinks a little bit about GSJ now sort of under this umbrella of the LIFE Core curriculum and thinks about it in relationship to TRW. What we would like to see to build a connection or sort of pull that thread through is that these three GSJ classes would all be built around either a semester-long community-engaged learning project, something much more in-depth, or it could be a global learning experience. The other change that we’re looking at that we’ll pilot in the spring with these three sections is that they’re being offered to second-year students. For folks in majors with many classes, particularly in their junior and senior year, this might create a little more flexibility in their schedule.” If you are a second-year student interested in taking GSJ this upcoming spring semester, Dr. Neiwert encourages you to get in touch with your academic advisor, who will need to give you permission to register for this class.
When it comes to the classes and credits that comprise the core, Dr. Neiwert said, “I’m really interested to see the sort of potential that the current CORE holds, so I have no plans to change the credits or what’s composed there at this precise moment in time.”
For students, the Core can often feel like a series of checkboxes. Dr. Neiwert encourages us to see it a little bit differently. “I think about the CORE as an invitation to consider that there might be other ways to think and understand the world,” she said. “The Core is a story. It’s a story that we tell in all of these different ways. We tell beautiful stories through experiments in the lab, from the kinds of primary sources that I ask my students to read in a history class, through the kinds of tables and charts that economists and data scientists might look at.”
That story can help students to be, “better at whatever it is [they] want to do sitting in a history, in an economics, or a political science, or a literature, or theology, or philosophy, or chemistry, or biology, or an art course. All of those things, they’re not the boxes that we just check. They’re the things that make us better humans and better practitioners of the things that we want to do.”
Dr. Neiwert is always happy to talk with students. She wants students to be able to come to her if they are having difficult experiences in their Core courses, wondering more about what the Core is, or if they want to share what is going well. She is in her office five days a week (CdC 480 in the Humanities suite) or she can be reached by email (raneiwert@stakte.edu). She cautions that she is not always the quickest at email responses, but she will eventually get back to you.
