This is probably more about undergraduate education in general than it is specifically about the subjects of this list so apologies for the slight off-topicness.
This is also not at all what Terry meant but I'm going to offer another take on teaching math to design students. I'll limit myself to graphic design students--even graphic design students at East Carolina University.
About twenty years ago, I wrote something for Design Issues about liberal education. (You can find it at http://www.gunnarswanson.com/writing/GDasLiberalArt.pdf if you're interested.) I have some questions and problems with what I wrote but I'll stand behind one of its basic premises--that "liberal arts education" has been overtaken by our successes. The phrase used to mean all of the stuff that an educated man knows. (It was a man back then.) There is no longer much of anything that fits the description. It's hard to describe a common body of knowledge about physics for an educated physicist. So liberal arts education has become what many of us compare to a Chinese restaurant menu--take one from column A, two from column B, etc.
We then leave 19-year-olds with the task of integrating things that we fail to integrate for them. The solution I offered was choosing a topic that was an intellectual nexus (I suggested graphic design) and studying it not as a vocational pursuit but because it leads us to (through?) physiology, psychology, electronics, etc. The question most related to this thread might be what math it would lead us to.
A couple of years ago, East Carolina University (where I teach) established a new writing program with the slogan "write where you are." The idea was to make writing classes connect in obvious ways with a student's filed of study thus both encouraging attention and focusing skill in a useful manner. My initial reaction was a worry that students in too many fields would have their writing instruction limited to interoffice memos and the like. After more consideration, however, I think the program makes sense.
Writing classes are among several categories of required "liberal arts" classes my students take as part of a graphic design Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. What would a "math where you are" or "social science where you are" programs look like? I've been thinking recently that there is potential for saving liberal education through the vocational impulse--the tendency in education that is seen as the enemy of broad education.
My students are forced to take a math class that is, as best I can tell, the class you'd take to prepare to take the first math class you'd take if you were embarking on math or science study. I end up teaching them what strike me as advanced elementary school math concepts like counting in binary and hexadecimal.
My niece (who taught math concepts to Chicago teachers and calculus to tons of undergrads on her way to her math PhD) and I were talking about what math is taught to non-math/science students. Anna made the case that the important thing that math has to teach the rest of the world is structured thinking. (Students at ECU do have the option of taking a formal logic class from the philosophy department but I don't think any of my students have ever done so.) I'd add the ability to understand numerical descriptions--basic numeracy. These would be much more useful than the first (and immediately-forgotten) step on a study path that is clearly not the path they will take.
I'd love to see math, sociology, anthropology, etc. faculty deal with the question of what they have to offer my students other than the assumption that their fields are important, thus taking any randomly-chosen portion of their offerings will lead to the student being more "rounded." (I'd also love it if I had to devise a class that would benefit their majors.)
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
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+1 252 258-7006
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