Saint Mary's College General Education

Present: Chris Cobb, Janet Fore, Kitty Green, Joe Incandela, Nancy Nekvasil, Daniel Party, Charlie Peltier, Patti Sayre

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Minutes of the previous meeting were corrected and approved [corrected version appears on the blog].



Future meetings:
The next meeting will be Friday January 5 from 1 p. to 3 pm in the President’s Conference Room. the main topic will be planning of the afternoon session for the Faculty Development Day on January 12.

Documents distributed

• A list of summaries of General Education programs produced by the General Education Task Force in March 2003.
  
• At the end of this list is a draft (due to Gail Mandell) for “Goals and Objectives for General Education at Saint Mary’s College”.
  
• A copy of a Point of view article from the Chronicle of Higher Education [October 8, 2004] entitled “Common Knowledge: the Purpose of General Education” by Barry Latzer. The article argues for a Core curriculum, in opposition to a distribution system for general education.
  

The Blog
The system is working. Joe will take primary responsibility for keeping it working, taking care of links, etc. It’s almost ready for public invitation.

Planning of the Faculty Development Day January 12
Most of the meeting involved exploration of different approaches for the morning session.

Conclusions that were reached:

• The morning session will focus on goals for General Education, to give us material with which to write a goals document around which to frame the discussion for the Spring semester. The work of developing the document will include posting of a draft or drafts and small and large group discussions during the semester. Participants in the work of the Faculty Development Day will be given several statements containing different goals and different conceptualizations of the goals (reflected particularly in different formats).
  
  
• The afternoon session will focus on models of organization for the actual general education requirements/program, informed by the morning discussion (and informing the ongoing discussion of the goals).
  
  After much discussion, an outline for the morning emerged. The morning will be divided into three sections.
  
  
  
  1. Reading and discussion of several models of goals statements.
     Participants will break into groups at tables based on their preferences among different ways of stating the goals for Saint Mary’s General Education. The groups will produce:
     
     • a statement (or list) of the strengths of the document for use as a framework
     • a statement (or list) of what alterations are needed in the document.
       These statements will be posted on large sheets of paper around the room for Part II and Part III of the morning.
       
     
     
  2. Advocacy for favored documents
     Each group will advocate for their preference to all the participants, discussing both parts of their conclusions.
     
     
  3. Straw vote of preferences
     Each individual will be asked to indicate – with a sticker placed on the appropriate page – a most favored and least favored document, recalling that this represents a preference for a framework for development, not a vote for adoption of a final statement.
  
  

The groups for discussion:
Five of the options for discussion and advocacy will be existing documents. There will also be a table for those who wish to develop a new conceptualization of General Education and a table for those who wish to work from and combine aspects of all the documents provided. The tables/groups will be based on:
1. The list of twelve goals given in the Self-Study for the HLC
2. The proposal from the General Education Task Force
3. An outline of goals written by Gail Mandell as part of the work of the General Education Task Force
4. The current statement of goals for General Education (The “Ways of Knowing” statement) incorporated in the First-Year student manual and condensed in the College Bulletin.
5. The description(s) of “The Saint Mary’s graduate” from the Fall Faculty Development Day
6. An attempt to write a completely new set of goals [The “Wildcard” table]
7. An attempt to combine the features of several existing statements into one statement [The “Hybrid” table]

What we’ll be doing
Each table will include one member of the committee, responsible for facilitating the discussion and listening to the discussion to take back to the committee. The committee will take careful notes of the discussion for the work of writing a goals document.