What’s up with Core 3?

Hey everyone!

If you’ve been to an information session with me, you probably got to witness me fawning over my Core 3 class. I figured now was a good time to write it down for all to enjoy.

As a quick recap, Core, or our Core Curriculum in the Interdisciplinary Humanities, is our fundamental sequence of three courses that every Scripps student takes. Core 1 is basically the same for every student (and you can read more about fellow ambassador Sam’s experience here), and then students get to differentiate more and choose between around 15 courses each for Core 2 and Core 3.

Core 3 is during the first semester of sophomore year and is the culmination of all your work in the Core program. Core 3’s defining characteristic is the final project. With the support of the class and the professor, we embark on an original project that is a finale for Core and good practice for our thesis senior year. The projects will look different depending on the class. Some classes have semester-long projects, like “The Life Story.” Students who choose this course explore adult development through memoirs and are paired with older adults in the Claremont community to help them develop a life narrative. Other classes might have performance-based projects, and others might have a more traditional final project involving a research paper or visual presentation. My class was in this last category.

I took “Core 3: History and Memory” with Professor Julie Liss. I’m a history major, and I was so excited for this class. Now, you don’t have to pick a Core class related to your major, but in this case I really wanted to. We were investigating these central questions: What is the relationship between individual and collective memories and history? What happened in the past and the stories we tell? We looked at many different sites that represent and interpret history, like museums, memorials, movies, and books. It was pretty meta. We discussed how history gets made, what narratives make it into popular memory, which ones get left out, and, interestingly, the role that silence and forgetting play in history-making.

One of our stops in the LA Pueblo was this mural, “América Tropical” by David Álfaro Siqueiros. The mural is accessed through an interpretive center.

I loved this class. We had so many interesting conversations about our class materials and our personal experiences. We also got to go on two field trips. We went to the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, which serves as a Holocaust Memorial and examines racism and prejudice around the world. We also went on a longer trip to Downtown LA that included visiting the LA Pueblo, the Japanese American National Museum, and Biddy Mason Memorial Park. It was so exciting to be able to go visit the things and places we’d read and discussed. It also drove home ideas about how history is involved in public spaces. I have found myself referring back to the work we did in this class many times since then. History and memory are always popping up as themes in our lives.

For our final research project, we could choose between a paper and a visual presentation or project, though I think almost everyone chose a paper. I investigated the history and memory around the democratic transition in Spain in the 1970s. With the ideas we’d discussed and an independent reading book we got to choose (but was built into the syllabus), I crafted a project that I was very proud to present at the end of the semester. I had this paper to (metaphorically, it’s on my computer) hold up and say, “Look at what I did! Look at what I’ve learned!” While I’m still nervous to start thesis next year, I am confident that my time in Core, and especially Core 3, has helped me prepare for it.

I hope you enjoyed hearing about my Core 3 experience. Please feel free to email me if you want to know more about Core or Scripps in general!

Until next time,

Siena

[email protected]

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