Core Curriculum Newsletter
Spring 2026
Dr. Omar Yaghi, once a refugee in Amman, Jordan, won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yaghi’s story reminds us that our work as Core instructors is to see value and potential in our students, just as we see the beauty of our own subject matter, and to introduce them to a part of the world that might ignite their imaginations and offer them tools for living.
Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Omar Yaghi, holds models of the metal framework structures he explored.
Opportunities for Core Faculty
Spring Book Club for Core Faculty
This Spring, we have space for up to 20 faculty to read and discuss Viorica Marian’s The Power of Language: How the Codes We Use to Think, Speak, and Live Transform Our Minds.
Books are free if you sign up below. Our meeting date will be Tuesday, April 21 from 12:30-2:00 in the SUB, room 210. Bring your own lunch!
A 2019 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Indicators found that:
- “a quarter of Americans ages 18 to 29 use a language other than English with family and friends often”
- “63% of Americans feel that teaching languages other than English to children is important”
- “Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are substantially more likely than White Americans to believe it important that young people learn languages other than English”
Core Curriculum Teaching Fellows Program
This summer we would like to invite select Core faculty to consider how they might reorient their Core classes around the idea of human flourishing.
Core Curriculum Virtues Recognition Award
The College of Arts & Sciences’ Core curriculum enables students to “acquire the knowledge, skills, and virtues needed to uncover and recognize truth, to deepen their faith, to live virtuously, to strengthen their communities, and to affect the world in transformative ways.” To that end, the core curriculum aims to “inspire moral, intellectual, and spiritual virtues." (A&S Vision)
Each year an A&S faculty member(s) will be recognized for teaching a core course in which a core virtue* is examined, expressed, demonstrated, and/or measured in significant ways in the content of the course.
Spotlight On...
Baylor Chapel
Description: Baylor students will be introduced to and engaged in substantive Christian thinking, perspectives, and practice through community informed chapel experiences.
Core Curriculum Objectives
As a common course providing all students a shared foundational orientation through unique and diverse experiences, chapel will strive to offer valuable teachings and practices.
Students will receive spiritual instruction and engagement opportunities through a variety of practices and pedagogies vetted by the Office of Spiritual Life.
Chapel experiences will expose students to, or continue to form them in, the knowledge of Scriptures, theology, and Christian vocation.
Chapel experiences will deepen faith formation through a framework of spiritual disciplines and supportive communities.
Chapel will provide a holistic, faith experience that cultivates cognitive, artistic, and relational engagement with attention to the diverse spiritual and cultural needs of participants.
Thank you for the work you do teaching Baylor students!
Photo Credits: Image 1: Living Magazine • Image 2: UC Berkeley • Image 6: Baylor Magazine