Core course
All Chicago Programs' students enroll in the interdisciplinary Core Course that introduces the concepts of place and identity in Chicago. The three program tracks will integrate thematically by exploring how the arts, business, and socio-political issues intertwine. This course intentionally views the city through three lenses, asking important questions that cross disciplinary boundaries.
Guest speakers from around the city will spark discussions and reflections. Common readings and projects will prompt conversation, creativity, research, and exploration. Most importantly, Core Course will engage students with the city as they meet the people who are making its art, defining its culture, confronting its problems, and reshaping its business. Through the experience, students will contextualize the Chicago they live, study, and work in for the semester within its rich and complex history, while imagining how the city's identity might continue to evolve.
The theme of the Core Course is Chicago: A City of Many Dimensions. The course begins with the question "What is Chicago?": is it a city that "makes no little plans" as proclaimed by architect, visionary, and father of city planning, Daniel H. Burnham, 100 years ago; Carl Sandberg's "city of big shoulders"; or, "a city in the make", as portrayed by novelist Nelson Algren in 1951?
No matter the characterization, Chicago is a city of complexity and contradictions, noted for its natural and artistic beauty, its innovation, its self-determination, and as a place where change commands the landscape.
The "Burnham Plan of Chicago" establishes the historical context for making certain claims about Chicago; it opens the discussion, engaging students in an on-going conversation that views the city with hindsight into the past century and insight into current issues centered on contemporary interpretations of identity, power, beauty, and place. By questioning their assumptions about Chicago, participants in the course will discover themselves as transformed agents of change in the arts, as innovators in business, and as individuals reshaping their communities.