What is the Carthage Symposium?

The Carthage Symposium is an innovative academic program in interdisciplinary education designed to equip undergraduates with the tools to succeed in the 21st century. All Carthage students must successfully complete one Carthage Symposium.

In a Carthage Symposium, two faculty members team up to teach a single course, allowing students to explore a topic through the lenses of two completely different fields. For example, a class may combine the art of digital photography with the study of biodiversity: Students learn to use photography to capture biological adaptations of plants or animals. A business professor and geography professor may team up to teach a course on applied statistics and geographic information science: Students learn to analyze data-based relationships in graphical and spatial dimensions.

The faculty team works to complement the Carthage liberal arts core curriculum, not only by building skills in written and oral communication but also by modeling academic discourse. Each faculty member comes from a different discipline, approaches the problems with a different skill set, and learns the specialized language of the other.

Faculty members engage and challenge students to ask questions such as:

• How do I work effectively with a team?
• How do I communicate with colleagues from other cultures?
• How do I approach diverse audiences?
• How do I see issues from multiple perspectives?

In both team-taught and clustered pair formats, the Carthage Symposium presents diverse ways of learning about and understanding the world, models effective navigation of boundaries, and opens up avenues to innovative problem-solving.