Insights from Director of Curriculum and Assessment Chris Barnes
Don’t Be Afraid of the Messiness
Messiness can come in many shapes and sizes. As a teenager, I had a messy room and it caused a lot of tension in my family as I tried to explain the underlying hidden organizational method of my floordrobe. My hair (if you can believe it!) was also curly, unruly, and considered by many as messy. I remember a basketball coach of mine would always introduce a new drill to our team by saying, “This is going to look a little messy at first, then it will all make sense….then it will get messy again.” I didn’t fully understand this sentence until I became a coach/teacher/father myself and came to understand that the messiness was part of something new.
Don’t Be Afraid of the Messiness
Messiness can come in many shapes and sizes. As a teenager, I had a messy room and it caused a lot of tension in my family as I tried to explain the underlying hidden organizational method of my floordrobe. My hair (if you can believe it!) was also curly, unruly, and considered by many as messy. I remember a basketball coach of mine would always introduce a new drill to our team by saying, “This is going to look a little messy at first, then it will all make sense….then it will get messy again.” I didn’t fully understand this sentence until I became a coach/teacher/father myself and came to understand that the messiness was part of something new.
The Honors Journey: Opportunity Meets Commitment
As we reach the midway point in the academic year, we want to celebrate a significant milestone in our academic program — the Honors Selection Process. Over the past 20 weeks, students in courses such as ENG 200, ENG 300, SCI 200, PSYCH/PHIL 225, DES 200, DES 300, LANG 300, and LANG 400 have engaged in what we call “Honors Opportunities.”
TD Week #2: Power, Politics, and Policy — A Journey Through Problem Finding, Framing, and Fieldwork
At Franklin, we believe that education should not just prepare students to succeed in the world — it should empower them to understand it, challenge it, and shape it. That is why we are thrilled to launch TD Week #2, focused on one of the most urgent and complex themes of our time: Power, Politics, and Policy.
From Knowing to Solving: How “Ways of Knowing” Power Transdisciplinary Thinking
At the heart of our educational mission is a bold, enduring goal: to prepare students not just to answer questions, but to ask better ones — and to solve the kinds of problems that don’t come with instructions.
Our Skills Curriculum has taken a significant step forward in service of that mission by intentionally weaving in the Ways of Knowing (WOKs) — key cognitive tools such as reason, emotion, language, perception, imagination, intuition, memory, and faith — drawn from the Theory of Knowledge framework in the Philosophical world of Epistemology.