Saint Mary's College General Education

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


Guest: Patricia Fleming

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Joe began the meeting by stating for the record that the Ad Hoc General Education Committee is now reporting to Patricia Fleming, the Vice President and Dean of Faculty, instead of to the President, Carol Mooney.

We spent the remainder of the time discussing how to conceptualize the Faculty Development Day (FDD) which will be held on August 23, 2007. Joe listed the following action items for us to consider:

1. report on summer work
   
2. presentation/s on the survey
   
3. learning outcomes/assessment
   
4. models/implementation issues
   
5. integration of learning
   
6. next steps/sharing the work (e.g. design teams)
   
7. announcement/invitation to FDD – what to include and how to encourage faculty to attend.

We talked about where to begin the FDD, and the basic consensus was that we need to tell how we have arrived where we are now. This would include information about our meetings with faculty as well as the AAC&U meeting some attended. We agreed that the discussion on assessment would be presented as an opportunity for improvement rather than as a threat for accountability. Patricia emphasized that the Assessment Committee will eventually be serving as a resource for moving the work of our committee along.

Patricia’s major charge to us was that faculty leave the FDD thinking and talking about “liberal arts outcomes” rather than “general education outcomes” – a paradigm shift. She was very pleased with the shift in the thinking of the committee. Patricia’s basic points about the FDD were:

1. be sure and talk about the committee’s development in moving to thinking about College/Liberal Arts outcomes from the initial focus on General Education outcomes;
   
2. at the end of the FDD, faculty should be able to see in their work a personal responsibility for the liberal education of the students whether they teach a general education course or not;
   
3. at the end of the FDD, everyone in all majors and all programs should be able to identify with the outcomes in a way that they see they can participate and contribute to the students’ liberal education regardless of the models.
   

We talked about beginning the FDD with a narrative of the path of the committee’s thinking from the end of the summer to now. We then talked about using some type of visual to show the relationship between the Mission Statement and the learning outcomes as expressed in the two models. With that visual we can also include the co-curricular contributions to the outcomes. The use of the visual would help faculty see that as a student moves through her general education AND major courses, she will achieve the stated outcomes, all of which come out of the Mission Statement.

Several specific questions were raised which we will need to discuss further:

1. Should we spend more time on the outcome “integration of learning” in order to help faculty understand it? If so, when and how do we do that?
   
2. Would it be better during FDD to have faculty discover on their own the shift from gen ed outcomes to liberal arts outcomes? If so, how do we facilitate that?
   
3. What about faculty who come to the FDD thinking they are going to see 2 models and are expecting to choose one for the College to move forward?
   
4. Should the outcomes be presented separately from the models? Can we provide a way to engage faculty in the outcomes to better prepare them to select one model?
   
5. Should a vote for one model over the other be taken on the FDD or later? How should that be structured?
   
6. How are we going to move forward to a program?
   
7. How can we best communicate to faculty that the accepted model can still be revised and that the details of the general education curriculum (what works to accomplish an outcome – design team task) will come?
   

Our timeline is that by the end of this academic year (2007-2008), a plan for general education will be approved by all constituencies, the logistics of implementing the plan will be worked out in 2008-2009, and the plan will be implemented in 2009-2010. We need to keep this in mind as we plan this year’s FDD and further committee work.