Once again a Tuesday afternoon at Maggies. Several folks in attendance stare wistfully at the sign advertising Maggies’ Pub offerings – alas, not on tap tonight. Jim buys us snacks as a consolation. Dan Kelley’s beautiful black dog keeps watch outside.
Greta, Peter, Jim, and Karen represent the CC. Jennifer Hubbert, Dan Kelley, Hannah Swernoff, John Holzwarth, and Jessie Starling comprise the voluntary attendees. Our CC-member hosts emphasize that the door is always open to new and revolving participation in the subcommittee meetings. Jim shows us his beautiful website for the Gen Ed project. We discuss ways to maximize student input.
We open the discussion with our hopes for the process, and our thoughts about how general education might contribute to equipping students with the character, skills, knowledge, etc., that will enable them to be happy and successful after college.
Continuing on the theme of “autonomy” vs./with “collaboration” highlighted by the students at last week’s meeting, we discuss the need for LC graduates to be able to communicate with people with whom they may disagree – people from other backgrounds, political views, religious beliefs, etc. We affirm Molly’s comment (posted on last week’s summary) that we as faculty can model this through interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion.
We also discuss the inculcation of a “growth mindset” – of seeing new and difficult situations as challenges rather than roadblocks – as an important element of either the process or outcome of a liberal arts education. Here too we note the value of faculty serving as models for this, e.g., by allowing student to see us stepping outside of our comfort zones, confronting problems that exceed our expertise, etc.
In bullet point form, some other major points discussed are below. All in all, a very pleasant evening – when I left the table at 6:10, folks were still discussing things like how best to allocate the precious resource of faculty members’ time — between teaching, research, and all the other myriad things we do.
Hopes:
- Possibility of taking advantage of our Portland location and/or emphasizing “place” in some way in the new curriculum.
Side thought: As I listened to folks talk about this, I recalled the strand model described by Paul Handstedt, and pondered how themes like “place,” “inquiry/knowledge,” “community and diversity,” etc, would make for interesting strands.
- Disentangling the desired outcomes of a general education curriculum (e.g., critical thinking, problem-solving, synthesizing information, communicating, writing, making good arguments, adaptability, ability to collaborate with diverse groups of people) from the perhaps not-so-current sense of distribution requirements as requiring students to sample different disciplines, which are conceived as discreet academic territories or fiefdoms.
- Integrating writing and research into the curriculum in a more explicit and deliberate way. Not necessarily throughout the curriculum, but at least beyond our current practice of seeming to relegate writing pedagogy to only the first-year program. John Holzwarth, director of the writing center, and Dan Kelley, research librarian, commented that a good starting point for this would be to somehow measure how much (and what kind of) writing/research students actually do in our current curriculum – neither of them have a clear idea of what goes on outside of E&D.
Side thought: I noted that one of the first things out of anyone’s mouth – including our prestigious alum Usman Ally (’04), speaker at last year’s Halfway There ceremony – when describing the benefits of a liberal arts education is that you become a stronger writer. It seems a shame not to make this an explicit goal/outcome of our Gen Ed curriculum.
Cautions/concerns:
- The need to keep a constant, watchful eye on the resource implications of any radical re-thinking of Gen Ed.
- Study abroad is in some ways integrated with gen ed. requirements, and we would not want to pull the rug out from under our wonderful study abroad programs by unsettling the way they fit into our curriculum
- E&D serves an important function for our students currently, and is home to a large number of non-TT faculty who are an important part of our college and our current Gen Ed curriculum. If we were to somehow reconceive our Core program, we would hope that (a) there would be continuity and efficiency in transitioning to a new program; (b) its current function in the curriculum would continue to be met somewhere in the new curriculum; and (c) there would be enthusiasm among TT-faculty to teach in and/or support the program in its new incarnation.
Jessie Starling
Religious Studies