Residential College students enroll in at least two Core courses and a Capstone over the four semesters in the academic program.

Each Residential College has a distinctive curricular focus with its own set of Core courses. Click here to download the Core course descriptions for Ashby, Strong, and Grogan for Fall 2020. (pdf)

Ashby Residential College

Ashby College’s curricular focus is Contemporary Media Literacies and Social Justice. At Ashby, we emphasize the humanities within Core courses that ask you to expand your understanding of literacy and communication. Using research along with more traditional verbal, written, and oral literacies, your Core courses are designed to include and interrogate in new ways the forms you already know well: sounds, images, and videos, for example. You will also learn how these literacies connect you to your community and the larger world around you. This approach helps you not only consume information but also interpret and create information.

Grogan Residential College

Whether you plan to major in the performing arts or one of UNCG’s other Professional Schools, Grogan Core is designed to provide you with essential competencies that will enable you to succeed in college and in your professional or artistic life beyond college. Engaged in demanding practices that address important human needs and real-world problems, professionals enjoy a high degree of personal satisfaction doing meaningful work that makes a difference and connects to their passion and sense of purpose.

Strong Residential College

With the goal of understanding sustainability and its broader implications, all Core courses are designed to generate a new perspective on both local and global settings. Through a variety of approaches to learning, you will conduct fieldwork, including hands on experience, observations, interviews, analysis and reflection that will help you make sense of your course material. For example, if you were in a history class, typically you might write a research paper or do a presentation, but with fieldwork you will actively participate in gathering research in the form of collecting data about what you see, hear, and touch. Hands on experience in the field can help you think about broader ways  to interpret sustainability, both locally and globally. How might your understanding of an idea or an experience shift as you participate in the research process?

Capstone: This course asks you to explore an area of research within your field of study or profession or (with permission) an area of interest that you find compelling. The course has a semester-long project that will result in a well-researched, multi-modal, multi-genre digital portfolio about your area of interest. The Digital Research Capstone is a critical and intellectual investigation that illustrates knowledge about your subject, your experience with contemporary media literacies and its connections to the Ashby College experience.

Capstone: This self-designed capstone experience asks you to pull together the most significant elements of your learning to catapult yourself into your next big thing. Capstones can take many forms and they typically build on your portfolio and reflect your area of professional or artistic interest. For example, capstones might include significant service-learning or internship experiences in your chosen filed, or a presentation of your portfolio and how you have developed as a professional and a student, or it might be an artistic performance, business plan, or undergraduate research project. Whatever the form, you will use the capstone to reflect, summarize, and communicate the journey you have taken and the important lessons learned. As such, the capstone helps to ground learning in your personal sense of purpose and fulfillment while helping you communicate what you know and can do. In this way, you deepen the links between who you are, what matters to you, and what you know how to do that are the bedrock of professional commitment and integrity.

Capstone: This course asks you to illustrate your knowledge about how your research topic intersects with sustainability and how those two elements connect to your experiences in Strong College by creating a semester-long research project (captured in a digital format as a website) that will result in a polished, online representation of yourself as a researcher, including your specific interests about sustainability, your connection to Strong College, and your research project about an area of interest within your field of study or profession that emerges from your academic and intellectual curiosity. The Fieldwork Capstone Portfolio/website is a critical and intellectual investigation that illustrates knowledge about yourself, your research subject, your understanding of sustainability, and your connections to the Strong College experience.

In addition to Core, Residential College students may enroll in specially designed Residential College General Education Courses.

Click here to download the course descriptions for Ashby, Strong, and Grogan for Fall 2020 (pdf).