Questions instead of majors: implementing a self-authored concentration program

ABSTRACT

The major is a standard undergraduate degree structure in which learners follow largely predetermined course paths with the primary goal of developing content knowledge and skills. Developing the more sophisticated ability to author inquiry is typically deferred to graduate training but can, we believe, be successfully cultivated in undergraduates through a self-authored concentration. This approach flips the conventional order of higher education by establishing self-authorship as the primary goal, from which knowledge and skill acquisition follow, and by placing primary responsibility on students – guided by faculty mentors – to design their course of study. As an extreme form of interdisciplinary inquiry-based learning and of self-designed majors, the self-authored concentration poses a deliberately disorienting dilemma in service of a deliberately developmental degree, preparing graduates for the rapidly changing demands of the future. We describe the implementation, features of success, and trade-offs of one such program, the single degree offering at Quest University Canada.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovative pedagogy
• individualized major
• inquiry-based learning
• self-authorship
• self-designed major

Acknowledgments

Quest University Canada is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. We are grateful to have been able to work, teach, and learn here. We thank all the Quest faculty and students who have developed and refined the Question concept and components over the last 14 years. We particularly thank Quest founding faculty members Jim Cohn, Eric Gorham, Glen van Brummelen, and Annie Prud’homme-Généreux for sharing their recollections, and Birgit Widmaier and Jacob Lagercrantz for providing institutional data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).