Passage, Wheaton College’s pre-orientation program, will look different for first-year students in the fall. Rather than a zero-credit course, the program will now involve a one-credit course required for graduation. The new curriculum will include more subject material on health and wellness as the college moves away from a mandatory wellness course.
According to members of the faculty curriculum committee, pre-Passage assignments will be reduced, lessening the pressure for students to prepare in advance. The course will no longer be pass/fail; professors will evaluate student work according to the college’s grade point system.
Previously, when the college offered Passage as an optional pre-college program, students earned two Christian formation and ministry credits. In the fall of 2022, the program converted to a mandatory requirement for first-year students, dropping to zero credit but maintaining the same curriculum.
Nate Thompson, director of Passage, said he recognizes that current students may feel frustrated that incoming students will receive credit for the course.
“I think everyone can agree, when you come and take your first class at Wheaton, it should be for credit,” Thompson said.
Around the same time as Passage became mandatory, budget reductions and staffing changes in the biological and health sciences department led to the end of a mandatory wellness course.
Brian Howell, professor of anthropology, said the Passage committee hopes to revive elements of the former wellness course by integrating subject matter into the Passage curriculum. He said that another committee recently conducted a study on the course and recommended a more holistic approach to the topic of wellness. Howell said the new approach will allow students to learn not only about the mechanics of the body, but also mental, emotional and spiritual health, among other topics.
“We want students to start off college well with the idea of sustainable habits: physically, emotionally and mentally,” Howell said. “We hope students would leave the course with a deep understanding of the human body as a gift from God, as something to be stewarded and cherished, and that they would gain some sort of understanding of how all that works.”
Thompson said the new course will continue to emphasize spiritual formation, while cultivating a discussion on how humans are physical, as well as spiritual, beings.
“You can still expect spiritual formation to be the core aspect of the new Passage course,” said Thompson. “But expect it to have a more complex conversation around the fact that our spiritual formation experience is one that’s also embodied, and how we take care of our bodies.”
Barrett McRay, professor of Christian formation and ministry, said he sees an opportunity for the new Passage course to flow seamlessly into CORE 101, which all first-year students are required to take.
“Over time, the Core faculty will know more about what happened at Passage and can build on that, rather than those things being separate,” he said. “My hope is that it will really enhance student experience.”
The committee is also collaborating with the chaplain’s office to integrate themes of embodiment and physical health into more chapel messages throughout the year, with the hope that this will encourage students to continue thinking about these themes.
While the new Passage curriculum will be noticeably different, the committee said they are keeping several aspects of the old curriculum. The previous curriculum focused on the transition into college through four aspects: community, the life of the mind, service and spiritual formation. Howell said the committee intends to keep the strong spiritual and communal aspects of the previous coursework.
“Some of those themes will remain, especially community and spiritual growth, but others will be replaced with holistic human flourishing, the term that we’re going with right now,” said Howell.
Passage will continue to pair students with faculty advisors, a practice that McRay said he sees as crucial to the Passage experience.
“One of the things I always loved the most about Passage was having faculty and students living together, eating meals together, spending time together just as people,” said McRay. “I think we attended to what it means to live life well, just through the rhythms of how we worked and played and served and ate together.”
The committee is still working out the details of the new curriculum. Their duties include finding course materials, including books and articles. McRay said it’s possible that, in the future, the Passage curriculum will include original writing by faculty.
“One of the things that we dream about is, ‘why don’t we just write our own Passage book and have different faculty write different chapters?’ I think that’s probably going to happen eventually, which I think would be really cool,” McRay said.
