Around the idea of learner-centredness, there are a number of things we could start to think about in terms of allowing agency to flourish.
One of the things would be removing majors and/or removing required courses and too stringent forms of laddering from our program structures. Doing this would free up the program for students to craft their own intellectual narrative in a supported way. But facilitating this ability for students to identify and foster their own unique style and sensibility would require a few things:
First, we’d have to devise courses which in their design and delivery will certainly allow certain students who want to followed a structured and incremental process building knowledge up on knowledge, capacity on capacity, course by subsequent course. However, at the same time our 300 & 400 level courses must allow students to come into any course knowing that they are able to succeed at the highest way (getting A+ grades where appropriate) based on the capacities and knowledges they bring to the course from elsewhere in the University's curriculum.
This freeing of the curriculum would require enhanced student advising, so that students could build a raft of appropriate courses for themselves and their particular requirements. One immediate step could be to replace ‘required’ courses with a ‘recommended’ status and think of this as the beginning of a reinvigorated process of student advising that involves both student services and faculty in a mutual process of briefing and information sharing.
In the end, if, for example a 3rd year Industrial Design student feels the need to walk into a 300-level media history course or a spend a semester working out things in a photo class in order to develop their practice, they have to be confident in doing so knowing that their GPA will not be affected by the fact that their existing skill set and capacities do not conform to too narrow a set of criteria.