Saint Mary's College General Education

Present: Chris Cobb, Janet Fore, Joe Incandela, Nancy Nekvasil, Charlie Peltier, Patti Sayre

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Next Meeting
The next meeting will be held January 19, 2007 from 2-4pm in the President’s Conference Room in the Library.

Faculty Development Day
Joe sent an e-mail to all faculty about the Faculty Development Day to be held in Stapleton on Friday, January 12, 2007. Faculty have begun to respond.

Chris presented the results of his research on 70 schools relating to their general education programs. Almost without exception, no schools with professional programs give these programs any role within their general education. We think this is certainly something to which we should be attentive not only because of previous discussions about liberal arts and professional programs here at Saint Mary’s, but as a way to make us distinctive in the United States. Chris prepared a very well articulated and well organized document which we decided would form the basis of the first part of the afternoon session of our Faculty Development Day. Our thanks to Chris for this great work!

The document included:
1) Structures for General Education
2) Defining the Scope of, Sequence of, and Context for Learning
3) Types of General Education Program Structures
4) Historical Development of the Types
5) Recent Developments
6) Interesting Examples of Each Type

There was much discussion during Chris’ presentation such as where would tandems fit within certain types of gen ed programs and where would integration of learning go? Tandems could fit into course clusters within distributive cores and integrated learning could go in the interdisciplinary grouping or as a senior capstone/seminar course. In the broader context at Saint Mary’s College, integrated learning could also branch into the Student Affairs Division to include service learning and/or student government experiences among others. Student government could be linked to general education through a wellness or a physical education component. The question was also raised as to whether assessment was driving some of the current reforms among general education programs. Within the presentation, we also discussed where Saint Mary’s seems to be at this point in our general education format.

We then discussed the specifics of our Friday afternoon session. Chris will be responsible for the first hour. Charlie will be overseeing the second and third hours. We decided to structure the afternoon as follows:

Hour One – Stimulate Thinking: Begin with a presentation by Chris using the document he generated. The document will be made available for all participants. During Chris’ presentation, he will emphasize that no schools include professional programs in their general education. He will also include specific examples of schools to illustrate the various types of general education program structures.

Hour Two – Dream Ideas: Committee moderators will facilitate discussions of our general education framework at six tables. Table discussions will be guided by the questions:
“What might we do on this occasion to define or redefine the ‘scope’ of our
general education program?”
“What might we do on this occasion to define or redefine the ‘sequence’ of our
general education program?”
“What might we do on this occasion to define or redefine the ‘contexts’ within
which we envision our general education program?”
The discussions will cover “scope” for 15-20 minutes, “sequence” for 15-20 minutes, and “context” for 15-20 minutes. The moderators will rotate tables while the participants remain at the tables. Two committee members will be “scope” leaders, two will be “sequence” leaders, and two will be “context” leaders (depending on the number of faculty that attend). At each table, the moderators will be responsible for recording ideas generated by table members. These ideas will be written on large sheets to be displayed for the larger group and will be posted on the blog.

Hour Three – Examine Framework/Model: Participants will be divided into seven groups to discuss the “types of structures” found in the various schools examined. The groups will be designated as one of the following types: disciplinary distribution, skills-based distribution, knowledge-based distribution, comprehensive core, introductory core, distributive core, and unique/wildcard. Experiences outside the classroom could fit into any of the categories, but the unique programs are those that make experiences outside the classroom central to their general education. Two to three examples of each type will be available at the tables for participants to use in the discussion. Participants will be asked to evaluate the model at their table using appealing/not appealing and workable/not workable relative to that model being used at Saint Mary’s College. Charlie will ask Mary Connolly to assist in leading the table discussion on disciplinary distribution requirements. Committee members will be responsible for recording ideas generated in the discussions and for encouraging people to articulate why they support or do not support a particular model. [Based on what we hear in the Hour Three sessions, we might decide to generate a survey for the faculty.]

Final Footnote – Nancy will make a statement of what the committee will be doing with this information (formulating 2-3 models for gen ed based on our development day and possibly a survey) and what we see as our work for this coming semester. She will announce that visits with departments will be taking place throughout the semester to gather further information relative to the models presented. She will also encourage people to continue to think about the information presented, and she will invite everyone to visit the blog frequently and offer comments.

We reviewed our agenda for the Friday morning session. Patti will oversee the morning session.

Phase One – Study Goals: Participants will be assigned to one of six tables where they will discuss one of five documents that has been previously generated about general education goals at Saint Mary’s College. The sixth table will be a wildcard/dream-big table. Participants will discuss and the strengths and weaknesses of their particular document. This information will be presented to the group at large.

Phase Two – Advocacy and Editing: Participants will then move to the table that has the document they most would like to see be used to guide the work of the Gen Ed Committee in the future. Table members then refine that document to better reflect what they would like to see, a scribe writes the major points/changes suggested of that information on the large sheets, and this is presented to the group at large. The original document will also be posted with the suggested refinements. All participants then use a color coding scheme to vote for the refined document or wildcard idea they like the most as well as indicating the one they like the least.

Joe will be assigning committee members as moderators. For the morning sessions, he will determine who works with which document. We decided Janet and Charlie should not be assigned to the table with the document from the Gen Ed Task Force. Patti would like to lead the wildcard group in both morning and afternoon sessions. For the afternoon sessions, Joe will determine which committee members lead the “scope”, “sequence”, and “context” tables. He will also determine the rotation each member should follow. Joe and Charlie will work on the assignment of participants to tables in Phase One of the morning session and in Hour Three of the afternoon session. Joe will make sure 6 tables are in place in Stapleton, writing tablets and pens are on each table, and packets of handouts are available for each participant. He will also make sure large writing tablets and markers are available for all groups (7 total). In the morning, the tables (6) will have 3-4 copies of a single document on each of the designated tables. In the afternoon, each of the designated tables (7) will have information on 2-3 schools that demonstrate a particular type of gen ed framework. Chris will generate this information and Joe will ensure all copies are made.