Origins The Course Leadership		Moving Forward with New Leadership

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The National Imagination Initiative - Moving Forward

After a decade of operation, the National Imagination course has achieved some modest but substantive programmatic and intellectual success: The course is now a regular annual offering required for all department majors. There is a smooth rotation of faculty teaching the course. A number of participating faculty have used units of the course to shape new curricular offerings within the individual language programs. (See www.clarku.edu/activelearning/courseroadmap/islands/ ) Having completed this period of exploration and growth of the National Imagination initiative, we have reached a plateau in our planning. In proposing the Leir Chair in Foreign Languages and Cultures, we are moving beyond a single course to a process of long-term development among faculty both within the department and beyond. As we now conceive it, the person who occupies the Leir Chair will be a colleague attuned to the philosophical issues that underlie the National Imagination initiative as demonstrated by the kinds of cultural inquiries they have developed in their research and teaching. Ideally, the Leir professor will have had extensive experience in collaborative teaching and research with colleagues across a variety of disciplines. The Leir professor will, in fact, be charged with shaping the development of a broader curriculum in which “Studies in the National Imagination” is the introductory level of a broader program of study that explores the artistic construction and promotion of cultural communities. Without precluding new possibilities for further development, we hold as our common view of the Leir Chair in Foreign Languages and Cultures a colleague working in collaboration with our faculty to reposition the study of foreign languages and literatures at Clark within broader intellectual and curricular contexts.