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Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts |
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Coe College |
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Describe your college's strength in supporting student academic development. Among Coe's strengths in facilitating academic and intellectual growth are programs designed to help students explore liberal arts values and methods and opportunities for both independent and collaborative student achievement beyond the boundaries of the classroom. Coe benefits from a long-standing First Year Seminar program that involves faculty across the College in acculturating new students to the liberal arts environment and building foundational skills. Individual courses are department-based with a range of cultural, social, and academic common events. Through the FYS, students receive training in information literacy, are introduced to a variety of the College's offices and personnel, and attend cultural events on and off-campus. Some sections of the FYS are linked by a common theme. The FYS is particularly successful as a collaborative venture, with FYS faculty meeting regularly to assess and shape the program's progress, and with strong working relationships between Academic and Student Affairs and between faculty and staff. A staff mentoring component assigns staff members and administrators to FYS sections. This gives students another supportive contact person at Coe, allows staff members across the College to develop relationships with students, and affords staff and faculty the opportunity to work together in guiding first year students through the initial adjustment period. The Coe Plan is a set of developmentally sequenced co-curricular and curricular graduation requirements designed to complement and deepen the general education and major requirements. The Coe Plan seeks to help students, including our population of first-generation college students, enter and appreciate the liberal arts culture of the College and then to forge thoughtful connections between coursework and future plans for careers and graduate study. Elements of the Coe Plan include Issue Dinners involving students in public discussions of contemporary social and political debates; workshops on oral and written self-presentation, typically elected in the sophomore year; community service; and, in the junior or senior year, an academic practicum in the form of an internship, off-campus study, or honors project. Each spring students share the results of their practica and other major projects at the Student Research Symposium. During the one-day Symposium in April, student writers, artists, and researchers present their work in discipline-appropriate formats, including professional meeting-style reports, poster sessions, exhibits, recitals, and performances. This gives students who have produced excellent work a broader audience for it, as well as the opportunity to practice formal presentation skills. For their peers, particularly underclass students, Symposium participants model the results of advanced, disciplined, self-initiated projects. Peer mentoring is integral to several College programs, including Orientation and First Year Seminar, but is perhaps most fully realized in Coe's Writing Center. The Writing Center is staffed entirely by student Writing Consultants who receive training at the beginning of, and throughout, the academic year. An average of about fifty-five consultants annually provide over 2,000 writing conferences, serving about forty percent of Coe's students. Staff members regularly give presentations at state, regional, and national conferences and have published articles in professional journals. Many faculty members build the Writing Center into their curricula either by requiring Writing Center conferences as part of the revision process or by requesting a consultant be assigned to an individual class. Describe your college's challenge in supporting student academic development. Our central challenge is to develop a coherent, integrated set of requirements that guide a student from matriculation to graduation. Our general education requirements need to more clearly reflect the College's mission and beliefs, student needs, and changes that have been taking place in higher education. Our current general education guidelines have been described by students and faculty as disjointed. The Coe Plan, designed to support and complement the academic curriculum, runs on a parallel track; it needs to be more fully integrated into the larger general education picture. While the First Year Seminar is a very successful first-semester experience, it is not strongly connected with students' subsequent experiences at the College. There is relatively little guided transition between years or between phases of a student's education. Finally, advising could probably address student development in a more systematic way. Think about a project for your campus. What could you do to address your college's challenge, with some financial support and the advice of your colleagues from other campuses? Dean Marc Roy has assembled a new General Education Task Force to review our current general education requirements and to develop a set of proposals for changes, if and where appropriate, that will provide the guidelines for a cohesive four-year liberal arts experience. The Task Force will examine graduation requirements, including distribution requirements, First Year Seminar, the Coe Plan, and our Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program. It will consider the goals of each of these components, whether the goals are being met, and whether the goals are consistent with the College's mission. Further, it will look at interconnections between these components and make recommendations about how those connections can be strengthened. We expect the Task Force's evaluation and recommendations to take three to four semesters and to include study of consortial institutions and participation in national discussions on dynamic, contemporary, and innovative approaches to the liberal arts general education model. Team Members
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