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"After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched from the tree. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, 'Let the children come!' and they ran from the trees toward her.
'Let your mothers hear you laugh,' she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling.
Then, 'Let the grown men come,' she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.
"Let your wives and your children see you dance,' she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.
Finally she called the women to her. 'Cry,' she told them. 'For the living and the dead. Just cry.'And without covering their eyes the women let loose.
It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath."
-From Toni Morrison's Beloved
In response to changing higher education landscapes, as well as our perceived need to develop a signature program, members of the Spelman College faculty have been undergoing an extensive reimagining of our general education and major curricula as well as our approaches to teaching. Our emphasis has been on experiences that promote integrative learning and the Association of American Colleges and Universities' LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes. Broadly conceived, we call our core initiative the Spelman MILE (My Integrated Learning Experience).
The Spelman College MILE was developed to address the difficulties that students encounter in knowledge transference between disciplinary contexts. The MILE includes initiatives designed to strengthen the extended orientation for first-year and sophomore students; develop interdisciplinary and "Free-Thinking Woman" seminars; promote quantitative literacy, service learning, and writing across the curriculum; and implement research-based capstone experiences within each major. It also implements the electronic portfolio (SpEl.Folio) assessment tool that permits each student to assemble artifacts and reflections from courses over time, thereby creating a "story" of her academic and personal progress throughout her years of college study. Ideally, the electronic portfolios provide students with improved understanding of their own learning...