About
This site offers an accessible introduction to the courses in Parsons First Year. We hope that it will give future faculty, both part-time and full-time, a sense of how they can fit into the varied courses in the First Year. It is a tool for Parsons program leadership as well, providing a window into how the work in this important first step in their major prepares students. Finally it is for faculty currently teaching First Year courses so they can better understand the work their students are doing alongside the course they happen to teach.
About Parsons First Year
The First Year curriculum is a common course sequence that constitutes the first Year of every BFA program and familiarizes students with the tools, methods, and skills of art and design. Strategic Design and Management students follow a similar, but altered sequence of courses that includes two quantitative reasoning courses that prepare them for their BBA degree.
The required courses for BFA and BBA students provide a core learning experience, the outcomes of which feed into continuing undergraduate study at Parsons. Many of the required courses also offer an array of options in the Spring, which, along with an elective course, allows students the flexibility to create their own pathway through the first year based on their own interests.
The Origins Parsons First Year
The First Year was first launched in 2013 as part of a large scale revision of the Parsons undergraduate curriculum. This project, called The Undergraduate Review, started as far back as 2004 as a school-wide effort began to rethink art and design education for the twenty-first century.
While there were many changes that the Undergraduate Review set in motion, the main aim was to provide the opportunity for students to explore the interdisciplinary possibilities at Parsons and the New School. The institution needed to evolve to better reflect the boundary crossing that had become increasingly commonplace in art and design practice and industry.
This was a monumental change and it required the rethinking not only of all of our undergraduate majors, but also the ways that Parsons functions internally and connects to the other colleges in the New School.
Over its long history, which begins in 1896, Parsons developed new programs, merged with the New School and grew ever larger. A result of our long history is that curriculum developed incrementally over the years and new majors and degrees emerged. Because of the structure of the institution at that time, these changes were often not considered holistically with an eye to consistency or parity.
The result of this incremental change is that the various undergraduate majors had become increasingly asymmetrical in terms of workload, credit structures, and opportunities for elective study. Because of this, it was difficult for students to take advantage of the breadth that Parsons had to offer.
The Aims of the Curriculum
Contents
…In progress