Saint Mary's College General Education

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

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Next meeting of committee:
Friday, February 2, 2:00-4:00 (President’s Conference Room)

Announcements:

1. Upcoming conferences on general education:
   a. March conference in Miami: Joe is going.
   b. May conference in Rhode Island: Chris, Janet, Joe, Kitty, and perhaps Nancy can go.
   
2. New documents.
   a. Joe distributed copies of the goals drafts from the 12 January faculty development day for discussion at the next meeting.
   b. Joe also distributed reports from SAC reps from major departments on their discussions of general education with other students majoring in that field.
   
3. The committee will meet with the SAC on Monday, 19 February at 6:30 pm. Joe reported that the SAC is enthusiastic to work on gen ed and has organized a subcommittee to work on it.
   

E-Mails Announcing Meetings with Groups of Departments:
The committee briefly discussed the text of the e-mail to be sent to department chairs inviting departments to meet with us. We decided that a specific date should be included for each department, and that the phrasing indicating that we hoped all members of each department would attend if possible should be more explicit on that point.

Faculty Development Day Evaluation:
The committee devoted most of the meeting to a discussion of the notes from the afternoon session of the faculty development day. We focused primarily on the notes from the discussion of the scope, contexts, and sequence for general education at Saint Mary’s. We agreed on the following conclusions on each aspect:

Scope:

1. The “points of fairly widespread agreement” from the summary of the discussions of scope provide a good starting point for the structure of Saint Mary’s general education program. These points are
   
   
   
   • the importance of considering skill development when thinking about gen ed requirements
     
   • the desirability of maintaining breadth in our gen ed requirements
     
   • the desirability of including professional programs in gen ed
     
   • the need to in some way recognize the Catholic tradition in the gen ed requirements
     
   • the importance of cultivating students’ values via the gen ed requirements.
     
   
   
2. These points suggest that the overarching structure for gen ed should probably be organized according to skills, but that non-skill-based elements should have an important place in the structure.
   
3. The areas of knowledge that faculty most consistently desired to see included in general education pertained to the Catholic tradition and intercultural awareness.
   

Context:

1. The summary of the discussions of context made it clear that there is strong interest in including a broadly conceived experiential learning element in general education.
   
2. An experiential learning requirement might provide one place for the professional programs to be more involved with general education.
   
3. We came to the conclusion that giving students a place to “process” their experience, to receive guidance about it, would be extremely important to the design of any successful experiential learning component.
   
4. There was considerable, but possibly not general, interest in developing common academic experience for first-year students.
   

Sequence:

1. The varying sequential demands of different types of majors at Saint Mary’s make it difficult to organize our general education program sequentially, although the committee acknowledged from the summary of the sequence discussions that more sequencing than exists at present would be desirable.
   
2. The experiential learning component in general education might well be sequenced to occur in students’ junior or senior years.
   
3. Some skill-based general education should be sequenced to take place early in students’ careers.
   

The committee also discussed in some depth several other matters relating to the three aspects of a gen ed program structure without reaching firm agreement:

1. We noted some of the skills that might be included in a skill-based structure, such as quantitative skills, skill in responding to cultural diversity, and life skills (financial awareness, wellness, etc.). The latter might serve as another point at which professional programs might become more involved with general education.
   
2. We discussed in some depth the desirability of having a “heritage” seminar as a common course for first-year students, which would address the history and the mission of the Sisters of the Holy Cross and of the college.
   
3. In conjunction with the discussion of a “heritage” seminar, we discussed the possibility of developing a sequential component of the general education program that would begin with the Catholic tradition, then turn to intercultural awareness, and culminate in experiential learning projects.
   
4. We noted our review of our FDD notes did not cover the subject of integrated or interdisciplinary learning. This subject came up more in the discussions of the seven types of general education structures, which we have not yet systematically reviewed. This matter is clearly important, and we should return to it.