In addition to tinkering with specific requirements, this curricular review has also examined the timetable of a Harvard education.

Motivated by University President Lawrence H. Summers’ desire for all of Harvard’s schools to align their calendars, the Working Group on Pedagogy spent this academic year discussing an overhaul of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) calendar.

The University Committee on Calendar Reform recommended last month that FAS, along with Harvard’s nine other schools, adopt a uniform academic calendar that starts each year soon after Labor Day, moves Commencement to late May and ends the fall semester before winter vacation.

Aaron S. Allen, a graduate student in the Department of Music and member of the Working Group on Pedagogy, says his committee assumed that first semester exams would be moved to December, so that January could be used for unique academic experiences.

“We worked under the assumption that the calendar would change and that [second semester] classes would not start January 15,” he says. “And then we said, now, what would we do?”

According to working group members, the curricular review report will propose several options for what professors and students could do with the January term, or “J-term.”

Everything from film festivals to laboratory research will be on the table if the College ultimately institutes a J-term.

“There are many creative ways such a block of time could be used,” says Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Richard M. Losick, who is also co-chair of the pedagogy working group.

Any four-week term is bound to have strengths and weaknesses different from a standard 13-week semester. In particular, Allen explained, students enrolled in J-term would take one course or focus on one specific activity.

“Do you acquire knowledge and understanding over a long period of time...or would you get it better six hours a day for three weeks?” he says. “The option of doing one thing can be very invigorating—to just read great Russian novels or just read minor Latin American poets, or to just think about astrophysics.”

Professor of Philosophy Richard G. Heck suggests that a month-long focus could be ideal for learning foreign languages, while Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn says that “there’s been some discussion about...using the J-term for some public service activity.”

Allen says a J-term could also ease the pace of College life.

“One of the problems of the intensity of the regular semesters here is the multitasking,” he says. “Intensity of study can also be relaxed.”

While the report will not recommend whether or not a J-term should be mandatory for all four years of college, the pedagogy working group has contemplated requiring students to participate.

“If we require it of everyone most likely it will not be innovative; if we require it of no one there’s the concern that people would find too many other things to do,” Allen says. “Nothing would end up happening even though departments would have to be very innovative in their approach to it to encourage lots people to come in.”