Curriculum Innovation: Blending Humanities and Business for Undergraduates

This Panel of faculty from the Albers School of Business and Economics will share their respective papers drawn from a collaborative effort to innovate undergraduate business education by infusing ethics more deeply into curricula. The projects were inspired by the movement in higher education to improve student learning by integrating liberal arts and humanities into pre-professional programs.1 The Albers faculty were gathered together by the Robert D. O'Brien Endowed Chair of Business who developed the project. Representative disciplines include business law, finance, accounting, economics, marketing and management. Each course project involves a discipline specific exercise (e.g., in accounting) with an ethical analysis, a framework of values which was created specifically for the O'Brien program and is the common thread incorporated by each faculty participant. The papers presented by this Panel describe innovation in pedagogy. They describe coursework that is responsive to the changes in higher education and the evolving needs of undergraduate students. Topics included are: humanities and professional education integration; ethics; sustainability; modes of learning such as critical thinking, multiple framing and reflective learning; and assessment of learning outcomes. FN 1See e.g., The Aspen Institute Undergraduate Education Consortium, https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/business-and-society-program/aspen-undergraduate-consortium/; and The National Endowment for Humanities Connections Implementations Grants, https://www.neh.gov/grants/education/humanities-connections-implementation-grants.