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Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts |
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General Education Review at Coe College Coe College |
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Coe is in the latter stages of a General Education review that was greatly enhanced by an ACM "Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts" grant. The grant allowed us to focus committee and faculty attention on current issues and trends in General Education and to emphasize collaboration and faculty development throughout the review process. History The General Education Task Force (GETF) was formed by Dean Marc Roy in the spring of 2003 to study the College's graduation requirements given the recent reduction in the number of course credits required for graduation from thirty-six to thirty-two. Early on, central goals emerged: to simplify the General Education requirements; to reduce them or make them more complementary with majors and electives; to propose a new First Year course that more systematically addressed the intellectual and developmental needs of new students; and to integrate Coe Plan activities into General Education requirements. The committee began with self-study and examination of other ACM colleges' General Education programs and then expanded our study to the General Education literature of recent years and best practices at institutions across the country. In June 2003, we distributed a faculty survey which gave us detailed information about faculty attitudes. During the next two academic years we held numerous faculty discussion groups and fora to test out the ideas we were developing and, eventually, the proposal we arrived at. The student member of the GETF held similar meetings with students representing a broad range of campus constituencies. We experimented with different kinds of discussions at different points in our process. We also attended national meetings, including the 2005 AAC&U annual meeting in San Francisco where a sub-group of the GETF gave a presentation on "Driving General Education Reform…Safely," and we held two extended committee retreats. We hosted two speakers, Jerry Gaff of AAC&U on national trends in General Education and Rik Warch on Lawrence's First-Year common course, who also served as consultants to the GETF. A series of small group faculty discussions about how to use General Education models to achieve liberal arts goals were organized on a more participatory, problem-solving model than our large all-faculty fora and were well-attended and particularly well-received. At the conclusion of one, participants rated it among the best conversations they'd had at Coe. As a result of these discussions, the faculty passed a working General Education Mission Statement at the final faculty meeting of the 2004 academic year. In June 2004, the GETF generated a multi-part proposal which replaced our current general education categories with a simpler divisional distribution model and a more robust Cultural Perspectives requirement; replaced our current departmental-based First Year Seminar program with a common course; proposed a second-term First Year course for a year-long First Year Experience; supplemented our current writing emphasis requirement with oral communication and quantitative reasoning requirements; and proposed a Senior common course parallel to the First Year course. Over the course of the 2004-2005 year, the faculty engaged in vigorous debate about all aspects of the proposed changes. We modified the proposal in response both to faculty input and to close study of enrollment patterns and staffing issues. Outcomes In April 2005, the GETF brought to the faculty three variants of its divisional distribution proposal and two variants of a First Year course. The faculty voted its preferences; the preferred models were refined over the summer by subcommittees of the GETF for a final fall vote. The divisional distribution option which prevailed in April is the simplest of the three and the one most likely to actually reduce the number of required courses. For the First Year course, a non-departmental issues course model won out over a common course. A faculty forum was held on the proposed changes to the First Year course during the first week of the Fall 2005 term. Those changes were approved by a wide margin at the September 2005 faculty meeting. Starting in Fall 2006, the College will move to a First Year Seminar program featuring non-departmental special topics courses designed specifically for first-year students focusing on a set of liberal arts practices including critical thinking, writing, debate, research and information analysis. These courses will not count towards majors or any other General Education distribution requirements. All courses will be Writing Emphasis. In addition, the faculty approved a Cultural Engagement and Service Learning requirement that includes first-year student attendance at four cultural and/or academic events each term and twenty hours of community service with a reflective evaluation. The very successful Issues Dinner element of the Coe Plan will be retained as a required first-year event and faculty members teaching in the First Year program will be encouraged to incorporate Issues Dinners and service learning into their courses. The faculty now turns to the question of divisional distribution. Faculty fora are scheduled for the period between the September and October faculty meetings in hopes of holding a vote in October. Looking Forward While that vote will bring to an end the official work of the GETF, the process of examining the College's current practices has generated a number of issues for further discussion. The quantitative reasoning and oral communication elements of the GETF's original proposal will be recommended for further study. At this point there is not sufficient staffing available for a second First Year course in the spring. The senior year course was proposed as a bookend to the First Year common course. Without the common course such a senior course would look very different; it may or may not be taken up in the future. Finally, advising emerged over the course of many discussions as absolutely central to the health and well-being of a liberal arts curriculum. The relationship of advising to the First Year program will continue to be studied as the program is re-shaped. The College is increasing its commitment to the training of new faculty advisors and looking into developing more resources for on-going training of experienced advisors. What We Learned Curriculum reform is an exhausting, at times exhilarating, and vital exercise for continual renewal of and commitment to institutional values. The method we chose was particularly intensive. We aimed at using the review process to educate the faculty about current issues in general education. We sought a highly interactive, collaborative relationship between the committee and the faculty as a whole. It is too early to judge how successful this process was. But it is certain that the faculty will take from it a clear sense of what does and doesn't work at Coe now. Even contentious faculty meetings were useful in clarifying faculty values; perhaps they were especially useful in doing so. The process has given us an image of ourselves. To take one significant example, we recognize that a dominant ethic for the Coe faculty has been what we affectionately refer to as radical autonomy. A dozen years ago the College adopted the current First Year Seminar model, a collection of department-based courses, in part as a reaction against a common course that was seen as too constraining, and the FYS courses have become increasingly independent of a few common programmatic goals over that dozen years. While about half the current faculty supported adopting a new common course, a powerful and ultimately prevailing counter-argument maintained that faculty members function best teaching their own areas of specialization in courses under their own control. We have also seen, however, that a significant portion of the current faculty is interested in collaboration and program-wide activities. The differences are not entirely generational but we do see more untenured and mid-level faculty inclining toward interdisciplinarity and joint teaching ventures. We also confronted Coe's particular blend of liberal arts and professional programs. Designing General Education requirements and a First Year program to serve liberal arts goals brought to the fore tensions about the role of professional programs. Again, in the end, this served as the occasion for a re-articulation of Coe's core mission of imbuing all degrees and all majors with liberal arts values and practices. It allowed us to recognize the ways in which our professional programs contribute to, rather than detract from, the special character of a Coe education as reflected in the Coe Plan, one in which the intellectual and the pragmatic are mutually reinforcing. It was a good time in the faculty life-cycle for this kind of self-examination. This is evident in part simply because the faculty responded with as much engagement as it did. We asked a tremendous amount of our faculty and of the committee and over two years, somewhat to our amazement, faculty colleagues continued to turn out in large, often record, numbers for meetings and discussions. In addition, we have experienced a significant turnover in faculty in the past few years and this was the first major curricular issue to go in front of our untenured faculty. It allowed them to see various aspects of the academic structure of the College and gave them the opportunity to help shape it. Our process was labor-intensive but valuable in providing the occasion for faculty to think deeply about institutional commitments and principles and about the liberal arts ethos that defines us. Gina Hausknecht, Associate Dean of the Faculty and Chair, General Education Task Force |
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