In the Middle Ages, an auctor was someone of great authority who wrote in Latin and was usually dead. God, of course, was the Primary Author behind two books: the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. No wonder the scandal when Dante insisted on calling himself an author—a layman writing about contemporaries, and in his Tuscan dialect to boot! But this doesn’t mean that the rest of written activity was denigrated as mere scribbling. On the contrary, many roles we now treat as ancillary were given great respect—editor, compiler, translator—and human authorship was understood to be a collaborative process always in flux.
It is in this spirit that I insist that I am not the author of the sample LC student identity statement but rather the scribe for a larger team. SoGE had decided to take up Paul Hanstedt’s challenge to establish first a student identity, next to distill from that qualities that could serve as goals, and only then turn to the curriculum to ask how might General Education accomplish those goals. Over the course of the semester in Maggie’s, SoGE brainstormed together about what qualities we recognized in our students, what virtues we would like to see nurtured, and what areas for improvement there might be. What became immediately clear was that the most unifying quality among our students was their fierce independence; in something resembling a theme for a Monty Python skit, we have a society of unique individuals. Other phrases describing our students were added: bright, compassionate, curious, environmentally aware, etc.
However, a two-column list can only get you so far, and I was tasked with drafting an identity statement. Part of my intention was to move away from the stultifying corporate-speak of white papers and proposals. I feared that, in the face of the apathy—or, perhaps more accurately, antipathy—toward GenEd after so many bruising discussions, something comprising a collection of abstract buzzwords would just turn people off, myself included. Dan Kelley had shared with the group the remarks of Reed College President John R. Kroger, which I found very moving. In a similar vein, William Cronon’s “’Only connect…’: The Goals of a Liberal Education” also resonated with me. (Thank you to both Jim Proctor and John Holzwarth for drawing my attention to this piece.)
Overcoming my shyness, I hammered out a draft and posted it to the SoGE folder. The group offered helpful feedback, and, to my surprise and relief, they allowed some of my more colloquial and corny touches to stand. Shifting from Maggie’s to the Dovecote one day, John Holzwarth and I met to refine the description. I had been uncomfortable seeming to ventriloquize the undergraduates in the previous version, and John was especially helpful in parsing out how the statement should have multiple stages, namely, who our students perceive themselves to be when they arrive, what we as faculty expect will happen to them while they’re here, and what we hope they’ll become by the time they leave. Speaking with John, I was affirmed in thinking the statement should be something that is hopeful and holistic; we decided not to try to hobble our identity statement by asking, “But how is that assessable?”
The next step, after the larger group approved the identity, was to derive some goals, so back to the drawing board. Once again, the aim was to avoid colorless language as much as possible. As Jim Proctor pointed out, if we were to have the same stale, broad statements about problem solving and critical thinking, then we might as well just lift those bullet points from somewhere like AAC&U’s LEAP Learning Outcomes.
I know this Student Identity and Goals may not satisfy all. Some may find it way too long. Others might feel it’s not long enough, pointing out that something that should be a hallmark of LC’s identity is absent or grossly misrepresented. All I ask is that you remember that this is not a mandate from SoGE. It is an example. This was an experiment conducted in good faith to see what a group of faculty, staff, and students could develop and how it might invigorate conversations about GenEd.
Now that it’s posted I can confess that I was skeptical of this whole process. I’ve never been that interested in discussions about general education, and certainly not those driven by assessment concerns; before this year on Curriculum Committee I had not paid attention to larger studies about GenEd reform. I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with such passionate, committed and thoughtful colleagues and students this term. When we began testing how different GenEd models fared in delivering a chosen goal, I found it eye-opening. Dare I say it, our meetings were even fun.