Group II Final Report

PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR

GENERAL EDUCATION AT THE COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON

Group Two proposes a framework for GenEd that is very similar to the current one. Two proposed changes are a thematic sequence requirement detailed immediately below, and provision of a four-year advisor for each student, discussed within the outline that follows.

There is a general consensus by the members of GenEd Group2 that we need some kind of thematic linking of courses. GenEd Group2 believes that a practical way to reform the College’s GenEd requirements is to keep all our current distribution requirements and add a thematic sequence requirement. Up to seven of the minimum of 9 hours in a thematic sequence could also count for satisfying the distribution requirements, so our proposal would increase the GenEd hours to 59. We reached a general consensus on the following points:

1. Establish a requirement for all students to take a thematic cluster.

2. Each cluster will require the student to take 3 to 4 courses (9-14 credit hours).

3. The courses must be linked thematically.

4. That thematic link is to be spelled out by faculty teaching the courses.

5. A faculty GenEd committee should rule on approval of all thematic clusters.

6. A faculty GenEd committee should provide periodic review of clusters, some organized plan of re-certification.

7. Up to seven semester hours of work taken to satisfy the cluster requirement may also be used to satisfy the distribution requirements--this point assumes the continuation of distribution requirements similar to our current gen. ed. requirements. (This is a change to seven from six hours in our previous position. The change would allow for a math course or science course and lab, for example, to count for both the thematic sequence and the distribution requirements.

8. Clusters may contain more than for courses, so that students are choosing from a group of courses within the cluster.

9. Each cluster must contain courses from more than one department (and students selecting courses from a cluster would have to take classes from at least 2 departments).

10. We think that clusters involving more than one school would be laudable and should be encouraged, but we did not want to require that all clusters have to involve courses from different schools. We did, however, decide that all clusters must be "endorsed" by more than one school.

11. Each cluster should involve some real working together of faculty, in other words, it has to be more than a paper cluster.

12. In order to ensure that the students are compelled to see the reality of the course linking, each cluster must have either (1) an introductory course to the cluster taken by all students in the cluster, which will spell out the links, show the relationships, and explain to the students their options of where to go next; or (2) have a capstone course required of all students in the cluster to bring the cluster to conclusion. We feel that this requirement would in fact enable the cluster to function as a kind of capstone or conerstone experience for the students, meeting many of the ideals of a GenEd capstone without as many of the administrative and staffing headaches.

In addition to this basic recommendation for a thematic cluster requirement, we did have some questions about such a requirement, which may still need further consideration. We did come up with some answers. We’ll provide the questions and our answers here.

It is certainly a potential problem, but it will probably be necessary to allow such students in the courses. However, students in the cluster should be given priority in registering.

Yes, as long as the cluster teams adequately justify its inclusion in each cluster and as long as the faculty members teaching the course are really interacting with both clusters.

It must remain the student’s responsibility for completing and passing coursework. If there is a single required course at the end of a cluster, however, it must be offered every year.

We should have a wide range of clusters. As many clusters should be established as faculty can work up with rationales and plans to again approval by the GenEd committee.

Again, this is the student’s responsibility.

The transfer student will just have to look on this as another GenEd requirement that they have to meet.

Sure, as long as there is world enough and time!

Students should be engaged in the GenEd experience throughout their time at the College of Charleston for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, the lifetime learning goal of GenEd dictates engagement throughout the undergraduate years and beyond. The GenEd requirements are the primary way we deliver liberal education at College of Charleston and hence central to our claim that we in fact retain an emphasis on the liberal arts despite our size. On a more practical level, it is difficult for students in an institution that includes Schools of arts business, and education, not to mention a variety of allied health fields, to take all their GenEd courses in any period less than the full time they are matriculated. This problem is severe for transfer students. The flexibility of the present system should be retained.

Developmental periods in a GenEd program would be realized in such features as Freshman Seminar and Senior Capstone experiences. We have discussed these two features with some seriousness, but despite some enthusiasm and generally broad agreement that they are salutary in principle (particularly the capstone), support is thin. Most of us suspect that implementation of a capstone on a campus-wide basis would pose insuperable logistical and organizational problems, particularly with regard to faculty oversight. While a minority thinks such obstacles could be overcome with creative implementation, many fear that an attempt at a campus-wide capstone program for all graduates would actually diminish the quality of the GenEd experience rather than improve it. Many members of the group are enthusiastic about departmental capstones, but it must be admitted that this increases specialization in the major subject and can hardly be called GenEd.

GenEd at the College of Charleston is temporally organized, in principle (see Figure 1). The GenEd requirements include specific courses that must be taken (ENGL, HIST), specific areas in which fundamental knowledge and or skills must be obtained, but with some choice as to level and subject (MATH, natural science, foreign language), and yet others in which a greater degree of flexibility is allowed and no objective other that disciplinary breadth is evident. Often these are taken in order of their specificity, although some students postpone lab science of math to the end of their undergraduate careers.

We recommend a more logical temporal structure for the deployment for these existing requirements. Math and a foreign language as well as English should be required at the outset of matriculation. Quantitative skills are as central to academic performance as communication skills (both being essential). Although language skills are difficult to acquire at the age for college students, we concur with the Language Division’s mission statement that a goal of our language requirement is to pre-position students for success in language acquisition if they decide to focus on this skill.

As is often the case in practice, the history requirement should be met in the second year, after English, and the science requirement in the second year, after math. Students majoring in science and history will have high aptitude and probably advanced training in the necessary skills and should fulfill their respective science and history requirements as it suits their major course of study. Opinions are strong and divided on the content of the history and science courses. We do agree in recommending, however, that courses meeting these requirements stress not only the content of the discipline but also the mode of inquiry. Making this point leads us to conclude that a third foundation course that stresses the mode of inquiry of (a) social science should also be a requirement of GenEd (Figure 1). As a proposal for such a course is currently under development, this should not be a controversial proposal. One of the two required social science courses should be such a foundation course, and if this is a laboratory course (four hours) then the GenEd hours requirement will de facto increase by one hour.

The electives (four in humanities and two (but see above) in social sciences) naturally sit on top of these fundamentals, as would the thematic cluster. The current flexibility in the timing of electives is desirable logistically and programmatically neutral.

Current requirements total 56 of the 122 hours required for graduation. Our framework would increase that to 59. The number of elective hours available to the student is a function of requirements of the major.

As we are not changing the number of required hours drastically, we believe the current balance will remain salutary. We are opposed to major increases in the number of hours required by the major because it lowers the number of electives the students may take and in that way diminishes the GenEd experience.

Coherence at the student level is primarily the responsibility of the student, but we recognize the need for guidance in this arena, so we have proposed that each student have the same GenEd advisors from enrollment to graduation. A major, but not the only (see below), function of the advisor would be to assist the student in maintaining coherence in his/her course of study. It is this advisor’s responsibility to see that the goals of GenEd are advocated throughout the student’s time at the College, just as the major advisor advocates the specialization implicit in the major. The dialectic between these two viewpoints will reify for the student a choice he/she will face often in life, the choice between both/and and either/or.

Two mechanisms explicitly contribute additional coherence to the program. The thematic sequence program adds to intellectual coherence. The GenEd advisor program contributes to programmatic coherence.

Transfer students are an important segment of our student body, but if they choose not to begin their college careers with us, that should not exempt them from our requirements or our expectations. The College of Charleston is a popular school; we do not need to lower our standards to attract transfers. Transfer students who do not transfer credit for our GenEd core courses should take them immediately upon entry. Transfer students must complete all courses for their thematic cluster at the College of Charleston, even if they receive transfer credit for one of the courses in a sequence.

The goals were not in the forefront of our minds as we discussed our ideas, as will be clear below. It might be advisable to adjust the goals to be in closer agreement with the proposed frameworks.

The major emphasis in our framework is on skills. This emphasis prepares the student for the major and for life outside our walls. But our framework also emphasizes content, the content of a foreign language, a laboratory science, and of certain social sciences and fields in the humanities. Our thematic sequence requirement aspires to bring some coherence to this emphasis on content. Finally, our proposal must be admitted to have little to say on the development of the nonacademic side of the student.

As the college functions more and more like a university, the major will acquire more and more emphasis and both liberal and general education will suffer. We recognize the importance of a strong major in the workplace, but affirm also the value of the breadth that derives from liberal education. Our GenEd framework bolsters the major with a foundation of skill and basic content courses, and complements it with a suite of electives in the humanities and social sciences. The addition of the thematic cluster requirement will add to this breadth and bring coherence to it. See Figure 1.

Although extra-curricular activities can contribute importantly to a liberal education and certainly play a central role in the lives of our students, enthusiasm for adding service learning, international experience, and/or attendance at "events" to the academic requirements for graduation is not strong in our group. Such activities do contribute to the quality of an educational experience. We encourage them and recommend that the GenEd Committee (see below) actively promote them in the future. But, as with Capstone and Freshman experiences, resources and academic structures are not present to administer a universal mandate for extra-curricular requirements.

Active learning is mandated only in the requirement for a laboratory course in science. Language laboratory and math laboratory, as well as writing exercises, are well known active-learning features of required courses that are not specifically mentioned in the GenEd requirements.

A permanent GenEd committee should be set up by the Senate, with membership similar to that of the Ad Hoc GenEd committee. The committee will serve both regulatory and hortatory functions. It will develop guidelines for interdisciplinary focus and coherence of thematic clusters, then solicit and evaluate proposals for thematic clusters. It will work with the assessment committee to develop assessment tools for the clusters, and recommend modifications to the cluster program as suggested by assessment results. It will monitor impacts of the sequence requirement on the number of semesters required to graduate.

The committee will be responsible for sustaining discussion of the educational mission of the college in general and general education requirements in particular. It will be mandated to combat the balkanization of the college as it inevitably develops more and more attributes of a university. In this regard, it will develop initiatives for the improvement of the GenEd program, and will submit them to the Senate for ratification and implementation.

Students should be held primarily responsible for their progress in meeting the GenEd requirements. Our advising system, in its laudable attempt to insure that students made informed decisions about their academic programs, inadvertently created a culture of dependence on faculty permission (rather than advice) and passivity in the student body. Cougar Trail has changed that for the time being, and this is a good time to institute something new. In the past, the advising center has started students on a responsible path through the GenEd requirements, but one that typically is not optimal for the major. As soon as the major is declared, a departmental advisor then corrects the course of the student to optimize her or his path through the major, but the GenEd requirements are than typically considered hoops that must be jumped through with minimal disruption to the major. Many majors are so demanding and overenrolled that it is difficult to graduate without subordinating GenEd to the major.

If the College of Charleston is serious about liberal education as well as general education, and our proposal to add a thematic cluster requirement suggests that it is, then advising must place more emphasis on GenEd. The best way to do that is to provide Freshman through Senior year advising by the same individual, who will be an academic and personal advisor capable at the end of four years of providing guidance for career choices and a well-informed letter of reference (which is seldom the case with departmental advisors). It takes at least six years for a faculty member to learn what’s going on in other schools and departments. so these permanent advisors should be tenured faculty or Senior Instructors only. Because they will be dealing with about 50 students each (although only a dozen new ones per year), they should be compensated with a 2-3 hour administrative release from classroom teaching. Students should retain departmental advisors for help with their major, but these are currently less taxed because of the emancipation of students from the signature requirement to register. A signature requirement for registration should be reinstated, but the GenEd advisor should be granted this authority. Advising could be spread over the entire semester. The release from teaching would allow the advisor to spend an hour a semester with the student without changing his or her own time budget from the present. Indeed, it might prove necessary to schedule a period when the advisor would be available, and require all students to keep that class period free for advising.

The GenEd committee should play a pro-active role in informing the advisors of GenEd requirements and opportunities, and provide refresher sessions in which advisors discuss the merits, pros, and cons of GenEd. Indeed, some potential advisors will have to be convinced of the value of GenEd and of this advising program. In this case, it might be desirable to allow certain faculty members to opt out of the program, by buying another member’s advising time with a 3-hour increase in teaching load, although this could present fiscal difficulties. (Still, it might be don intradepartmentally.)

Throughout our discussion of GenEd, resources have been a major, off-stage, participant. While many of us might be interested in a variety of innovative-sounding programs, the most frequent refrain has been, "That won’t work." Faculty are understandably leery of laying on additional requirements that will cause them to assume additional, mostly administrative, responsibilities without compensation in time or money. Our commitment to and enjoyment in teaching is illustrated by broad support for the thematic cluster idea, despite the obvious increase in workload it will entail for those participating.

The history of extra-mural academic funding in this country makes it clear that changes in research focus are easy to engender with funding initiatives. Desirable programs such as universal freshman seminars and senior capstone experiences will be taken seriously by the faculty when resources are provided to implement them without adding to the already heavy (admittedly often self-imposed) workload of the faculty. For the present, we believe that the changes we have advocated for advising will contribute more to GenEd tan expensive across-the-board programs for freshman or seniors. We urge the administration to find the resources to put this program in place.

Our framework relies mainly on the existing program, but resources would have to be re-allocated to effect the new advising system. We are advocating this change on philosophical grounds, not fiscal ones, but suspect that some funding currently allocated to advising could be diverted to pay for faculty release time. The thematic clusters will require some additional funding, but we suspect this need can be met from existing course development funding and a few grants.