Calendar of ACM events

ACM conferences & workshops

Visiting faculty positions on off-campus study programs

Faculty development opportunities

Faculty Career Enhancement Project (FaCE)

Committee on Minority Concerns

Committee on the Status of Women

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)

Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts

St. Olaf College

Strengths

The strengths of St. Olaf College influence students' first year experience on at least two levels: commitment to a caring and engaged environment for students, and variety that stems from exceptional faculty and staff expertise and intellectual curiosity.

St. Olaf is committed to initiating and maintaining personal contact with students. We work toward this goal beginning with initial contact between the Admissions Office and students (and their parents). Several programs are meant to ensure that newly arrived students integrate successfully, both academically and personally, into the community. Week I, our new student orientation period, includes, for example, an introduction to the physical campus, an academic planning process that culminates in registration for the first semester, and an orientation to the many academic departments and programs, and to campus support services. Helping students during this period and the whole first year are staff (the Academic Advising Center, the Academic Support Center, the First Year Class Dean of Students, among many others), faculty advisors and committed classroom instructors, and students (Academic Peer Advisors, Junior Counselors, Peer Tutors).

St. Olaf College's system of general education requirements is designed to ensure that students be liberally educated on two levels: through fundamental acquaintance with various types of content, and through acquisition of fundamental intellectual skills (especially oral and written competence, intermediate level foreign language proficiency, and proficiency in defining and analyzing ethical issues and perspectives). We have developed several alternatives to completing the general education requirements that are earmarked for a student's first year, first year writing and religion. Most students take Religion 121: Bible in Culture and Community and General Education 111: First Year Seminar. Alternatively, we offer four "conversation" programs (American Conversation, Asian Conversations, First Conversations, Great Conversation) that, each in its own way, attempt to impart some coherence on the first year (and in some cases the sophomore) experience by linking a number of General Education requirements to integrated experiences with common themes and perspectives, in some cases a common residential experience, and an on-going group of faculty and fellow students. Among other experiences designed specifically for first year students, we note special History Department seminars and some specially funded off-campus January term courses designed to give first year students a hands-on experience of diversity. The College's curriculum reflects the faculty's creativity, intellectual curiosity, and commitment to teaching what they love to teach.

Challenges

To a large degree, the College's challenges are the result of its strengths. Faculty propose and carry out new initiatives but sometimes fail to consider the relationship of each to the others. A case in point is our first year writing and religion courses. In each case, the curriculum offers many choices of interesting topics to students, but individuals teaching in the programs do not sufficiently communicate with each other. Different sections of first year religion vary significantly not only in topic but, more problematically, in the understanding of the instructors of what is to be accomplished through the course. For GE 111, the overall objectives are clearly articulated in the General Education Guidelines for First Year Writing and are further communicated to instructors through training. What is perhaps less clear is how these faculty-generated objectives function from the perspective of the students. How does, for instance, the research experience required in GE 111 complement requirements in other courses, especially Religion 121, taken by first year students? We need to be more intentional about coordinating our efforts.

We also have not thought very systematically about the transition from the first year to the second in curricular terms. Certain parts of the general education curriculum, such as our requirements in religion (first year religion, followed by a course in theology) and the foreign language requirement, which extend over more than one year, could help us to define this transition, but so far we have not looked at them in this light.

One could argue that a similar unconnected plethora exists in the area of support services, given the quantity of support offices and programs (various peer group programs) that exist. At the same time, we could improve our services to transfer students and international students. We also need to explore more fully the impact of the increase in numbers of students coming to St. Olaf with prior credit such as AP, PSEO, and transfer credit. Finally, we need to improve our services to all students in the area of registration and consider such initiatives as summer registration for incoming first year and other new students.

Project

Our ACM First Year Experience planning group identified the effort at coordination of resources as one project that the ACM initiative on the first year could support. We propose a task force (perhaps consisting of the current ACM First Year Experience planning group with the addition of some others, possibly including students) that would focus on the following activities:

• To learn more about our entering students and their families in terms of interests, expectations, and plans for their college experience, perhaps by means of a newly designed questionnaire for incoming students. Our goal would not be simply to meet those expectations but, more importantly, to allow us to shape students' and parents' expectations in ways we believe are appropriate to members of a liberal arts community.
• To work with another committee has begun to consider an alternative to our current Week I, an alternative that would better prepare students for their first year experience.
• To attempt to define more clearly the difference between the first and second years in terms of students' intellectual development. For example, one could look at the first year as an "inwardly focused" year during which students explore why they chose a small church-related liberal arts college, what experiences constitute the liberal arts, and how they view themselves in this context. By contrast, the second year could be seen as an "opening out" toward new experiences and new perspectives, planned intentionally to help students further the goals for their education developed in the first year. Our recently received Lilly Foundation grant could help with these efforts. The focus of that grant is the experience of vocation, and it seems pertinent to have students reflect on questions such as: What are my intellectual passions? What skills do I need in order to express them? A possible related initiative would be some type of on-line portfolio such as the one used at Kalamazoo College, Michigan.
• To identify a group of faculty who regularly teach first year religion and first year writing and to provide necessary resources to allow them to work together on the relationship between these courses. The resultant set of common objectives and goals could address, for example, expectations for the types of oral and written work students complete, the intellectual competencies they acquire both within individual courses and also sequentially across the first year.
• Subsequently to begin to articulate the way we envision the transition between the first year and the sophomore year in terms of students' intellectual development, skills, and perspectives.
• A related initiative involves discussing and implementing appropriate procedures for summer registration of new students and, more generally, for registration in general. This initiative is in part connected to the development of a new records system, currently in process.

Team Members

• Mary Cisar, Registrar/Assistant VP for Academic Affairs & Associate Professor of French (Liaison)
• Diane Leblanc, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies & Director of Writing
• Bill Poehlman, Associate Professor of Religion
• Patricia Smith, Director of the Office for Career Connections

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