UK Core Classes Emphasize Creativity

The students in Marty Henton's art class wear spattered smocks as they layer paint and stencil designs over their projects, but don't confuse them for virtuosos. "I'm not, like, an artist," said Bethany Brookover, a sophomore transfer from Cincinnati, as she mixed a gold glaze over her art project. "I've never even been to an art museum before." Given the choice, Brookover and most of her classmates might have kept it that way. But this class, Pathways to Creativity, is not an elective. It's a requirement, part of UK's new general-education-studies program, known as UK Core. The vast, multi-year undertaking has completely revamped undergraduate requirements in an effort to better prepare students for a different world than the one students faced in the 1980s, when the last general-education-studies plan was designed.