Welcome to Ashby College Core!

Ashby College is a curricular and co-curricular academic community that focuses on the humanities and the liberal arts, although the program is open to all majors. Ashby students will complete a series of General Education courses that constitute the Ashby Core series.

With the goal of understanding contemporary media literacies and social justice, Core courses ask you to think about the ways we encounter individuals, communities, cultures, ideas and perspectives with thoughtful intention. You will have opportunities to think through and express concepts connected to social justice by learning about the varied ways we communicate and form our ethical values in this digital age. Every core course, regardless of the content or subject, helps you focus on how to think about the world you live in.  In particular, Core directs your attention toward how to talk about and make meaning from what you want to learn and know as a student in college.

We will explore genres that consider other forms of literacy that extend beyond traditional reading and writing, such as the literacy of sounds, visual images, spatial relations and gesture or movement. Examining ideas from your coursework through the lens of social justice—while expressing those ideas using multiple literacies and forms—helps you talk about and make sense of the content you are learning. Keeping our focus in mind, you can think about many other ways to communicate and process what you know and care about: a podcast, a video, a map, a recipe, a eulogy, a dance, a comic strip panel. How does your thinking about a subject grow and change as you put your ideas into different shapes and perspectives?

Core and the Ashby College Curriculum:

Ashby College students take two (2) core courses during their two years in the program. These are General Education courses that are designed to help you make connections between ideas and concepts presented in Core and your other courses at UNCG.

Click here for the list of the Fall 2020 Ashby Core Offerings

Completion of your capstone course pulls together the Ashby College experience. Every Ashby College student completes a capstone course during the spring semester of their sophomore year. This course generates your research project in the form a poster presentation and a website that focuses on a research inquiry of your own interest. The final project is a collection of genres that illustrates your researched opinion about an issue connected to your experiences in Core, your particular course of study at UNCG, or any other area of critical inquiry that has resulted from your intellectual curiosity.

All Residential College students enroll in RC courses. These courses are open to students across all three Residential Colleges and offer a variety of themes and topics.