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Best
Practices
Monmouth
College has a strong record of helping students acclimate to college.
We make a special effort to shepherd them through a series of shared
experiences, courses, and programs which give them a common academic
and social ground.
Academically,
their first year presents them with three required general education
courses:
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Freshman Seminar: This first-semester, interdisciplinary
introduction to college is designed to allow students to stretch
themselves intellectually via the establishment of a variety of
study and academic survival skills. The curriculum, common to
all sections, consists of core texts from across the disciplines
but centered on a single theme, such as "Technology and the Human
Condition." Students are asked to develop reading, writing, and
research skills. They are also introduced to various Student Life
resources, such as the Wackerle Career and Leadership Center.
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English 110, Composition and Literature: This course asks
students to write five or six sizeable essays as they develop
their abilities to read and think critically. In addition to emphasizing
the writing process, it also stresses understanding the symbolic
and expressive uses of literature.
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CATA 101, Fundamentals of Communication: The oral half
of the writing/speaking requirements for first year students,
Communication and Theater Arts 101 is a practice-oriented introduction
to speaking in a number of forms and rhetorical situations.
To
bolster first year success, the Dean of Students' Office offers
both Summer and Fall Orientations; the latter is an intensive three-day
program followed by on-going sessions during the semester (approximately
one per week). Both orientations concentrate on three main areas:
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Place: During the Summer and Fall Orientations, Monmouth's
campus life is introduced and reinforced. This means addressing
daily information such as housing, student services, and roommate
conflict issues; it also means knowing where to go for what, including
introductions to the financial aid, registrar, health services,
and counseling services offices, as well as the Wackerle Center.
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Purpose: The orientations also begin to instill in our
students a sense of Monmouth College's particular liberal arts
traditions. Included in these are introductions to our General
Education Rubrics, presentations on the value of a liberal arts
education, and programs on the history and traditions of the College.
Amongst the most important of these traditions is our Matriculation
Ceremony for the incoming class; as part of the ceremony, students
read in unison a Matriculation Pledge and recess through a receiving
line of the Faculty, who welcome each student to the College.
By unifying their presence as a whole class while receiving them
individually into the college community, we hope to emphasize
our shared purpose-a fine liberal arts education-while also beginning
the personal relationships which can help make this education
meaningful to them.
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People: Obviously, the Matriculation Ceremony is important,
then, not only because it emphasizes purpose but also because
it begins to build relationships with the people of the campus.
The orientations also focus on ways in which such relationships
can be made and maintained, whether between students with like
academic or social goals or between professors, staff and students.
The orientations are supplemented by strong faculty advising and
college-wide initiatives such as "Mentoring Week," an opportunity
for professors to meet with their advisees and discuss academic
outlooks, formulate career plans, and gauge the students' general
engagement with college. We take care to present students as many
opportunities as possible to meet people with whom they might
connect.
Challenges
Because
Monmouth is in the midst of a complete curriculum review, we are
already deep into discussions about what we might do better. In
particular, we have four areas of concern:
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We have made strides to integrate Student Life issues with Freshman
Seminar in the past, but it has only been partially successful.
One of the challenges we face, then, is how to engage an already-burdened
professoriate so that it will address Student Life matters alongside
the academic ones, particularly in Freshman Seminar. We have a
proposal on the table, a one-credit course called Orientation
for Success, but would be interested to hear how other campuses
handle similar issues.
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We need to work continually on suitable assessment methods for
the goals that we have built into the new curriculum. Though these
might be elaborate measures, they need not be. At one end of the
assessment scale, we are participating in the National Survey
of Student Engagement, which will provide us copious data on both
our students and students from several similar liberal arts colleges.
(Since this survey is also entering a phase of querying professors,
we will be able to generate assessment data for faculty as well
as students.) At the other end, as an example, if we have said
that students ought to write better, there are course-embedded
portfolio or exam diagnostics which could be employed to chart
that improvement. In any case, we are interested in assuring both
that our faculty and staff can monitor the intentionality and
effectiveness of the curriculum and that our students can perceive
intention and results when they come to the end of their fourth
year here.
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We need to strengthen the ways in which our students engage critical
thinking, helping them build upon their knowledge year-to-year.
A common subcategory of this topic is how we help students differentiate
between opinions. This means that we need to offer more (and,
again, more intentional) opportunities which allow them to think
about how they value arguments, how they might sort out cognitively
which position of several is most defensible. Right now we deliver
such a course in the senior year with our menu of Issues and Ideas
classes. The new curriculum may give our students contact with
such a valuing process in both the sophomore and senior years,
in particular, with the introduction of new rubrics of courses.
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An on-going challenge for Monmouth College is the best way to
recruit and retain stronger students. Through an Ideal Student
Self-Study, we have proposed a number of methods to increase the
quality of classroom participation, persistence, and success in
our student body. This is obviously a matter of "engagement" in
the first year and beyond as we search for the right admixture
of students to initiate and continue our pursuit of a better liberal
arts education.
Project
for the Campus
Over
the last three years, Monmouth College has undergone a major curriculum
review, beginning with our core curriculum. Thus, our major project
for the next several years will be to implement the new curriculum
that we have been fashioning. This involves retooling "old" courses
as well as the introduction of new ones. For instance, in the coming
year, Freshman Seminar will be running three pilot programs under
its aegis: one, begun this year, will generate a cohort of students
who will take English 110 and Freshman Seminar with the same instructor
in successive class hours, with some shared readings; another, also
begun this year, involves three instructors teaching independent
sections but significantly overlapping material, students, and presentations
during the semester; the third will involve sections of Freshman
Seminar being offered as named topical classes, shaping the course
content to the professor's interests while still maintaining ties
to the overall focus of Freshman Seminar itself.
Our
goal is to make sure that students understand the purposes and goals
of the curriculum as a whole; rather than just "taking the classes,"
they ought to have some notion of the intentionality of the curriculum
as we have conceived it. This means clarifying outcomes as well
as rubrics, a process that can only come with lots of conversation
with colleagues both on campus and off.
Team
Members
- George
Arnold, Dean of the College & VP for Academic Affairs
- Rajkumar
Ambrose, Associate Dean of the Faculty
- Jacquelyn
Condon, VP for Student Life & Dean of Students
- Michael
Connell, Chair & Associate Professor of Political Economy and
Commerce
- Patricia
Draves, Associate Professor of Chemistry
- Christopher
Fassano, Associate Professor of Physics
- Trudi
Peterson, Assistant Professor of Communications
- Mark
Willhardt, Assistant Professor of English (Liaison)
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