Saint Mary's College General Education

Present: Vince Berdayes, Stacy Davis, Kitty Green, Laura Haigwood, Joe Incandela, Mary Ann Kanieski, Frances Kominkiewicz, Elaine Meyer-Lee, Annette Peacock-Johnson, Ujvala Rajadhyaksha, Julie Storme, and Laurel Thomas

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The meeting took place at 3:30 and lasted until approximately 5:00.

Kitty Green, and Joe Incandela needed to leave the meeting after approximately ½ hour due to other commitments.

Unable to attend were: Ryan Dombkowski and Jan Pilarski. They and Joe Incandela were, however, able to attend a subcommittee meeting earlier in the day and discussed the same agenda items. Their feedback is incorporated into the summary below.

Summary

The meeting began with a few announcements by Mary Ann Kanieski regarding the upcoming General Education lunch and our expected timetable for completing our charge. The General Education lunch is scheduled for Wed. Feb. 27th; during the lunch we will present our general education design thus far. Mary Ann Kanieski, Julie Storme, and Joe Incandela will be meeting tomorrow in order to begin preparing for that presentation.

With regard to our timetable: The General Education Committee will begin to constitute the Design Team for Learning Outcome 2 this week. Their goal is to have the second design team constituted before spring break so that they can begin their work in earnest once classes resume. Thus, there will be some overlap between the two design teams, which, hopefully, will assist in the coordination of their respective work. It is our hope and expectation that we will be able to settle on a design for the theoretical and experiential components before spring break. It is not our expectation, however, that we will have our final design by that point. It is likely that we will not resolve the matter of the senior capstone, whether we wish to have one and if so what it will look like, until the week after spring break. It is our hope that we can bring resolution to this question and finalize a number of details during that week. After this date (March 14) it is our expectation that our charge will be completed, that we will no longer need to meet although there is the possibility that we may need to tie up loose ends via email exchanges.

Mary Ann K. then addressed the matter of a need for rationales. She explained that in the course of a discussion she and the other members of her subcommittee realized that they could not justify why a First Year Seminar was needed for a Learning Outcome 3, or even why it was needed at all. This led to the realization that we had not addressed what should have been our first order of business, namely a rationale for First Year Seminars and, indeed, a rationale for every element of the design we propose. She made the point that we are going to be passing our design to other design teams who will eventually bring the entire proposal to the faculty and that the rationales were the essential link between the Learning Outcomes, unanimously approved by the faculty, and the general education curriculum that we and others design. Without rationales it will be much more difficult, perhaps even impossible, to justify the design we create. Given that neither ourselves, the future design teams, nor the faculty at large will have done the research and investigation of the General Education Committee, it is essential that we incorporate their knowledge and ours into a rationale that can provide both a context and a justification for our ultimate general education design. To that end, Julie Storme brought to everyone's attention the future charges (Item III on the meeting's agenda), which called for rationales and announced that she would be asking for volunteers to write rationales.

Julie S. then quickly explained that the subcommittees were divided on whether students should take two courses or one course in order to fulfill the theoretical component of our design and similarly divided on whether or not students should complete two or one experiential learning requirements. She announced that the co-chairs would be sending out an email asking for a vote on this and other questions.

Julie S. then continued by asking for clarifications or corrections to the various explanations that the subcommittees had written with regard to the votes requested of them in the email of 2/19 ("compilation of votes and rationales"). She offered a clarification that Option B would require students to take a Learning Outcome 3 in their first year if their First Year Seminar was not a Learning Outcome 3 seminar and also that her subcommittee didn't feel that there would be hostile resistance to offering Learning Outcome 3 First Year Seminars, only that some, perhaps many faculty would feel excluded from the First Year Seminar program if all FYS must fulfill a Learning Outcome 3 requirement. No other clarifications were offered.

Julie S. then continued by inviting any compromise proposals that might have come out of the subcommittees. A member of the committee then pointed out that her subcommittee had built some compromises into the rationales they wrote: namely that they agreed that all students should encounter in some course a content related to the mission of the Sisters of the Holy Cross (and the College?) and also that they had eliminated the 1 credit senior writing workshop that they had originally proposed. Julie S. then presented compromises that had originated in her subcommittee. (These appear at the end of this summary.)

Discussion was then opened up. (N.B. this summary does not attempt to reproduce an accurate representation of the chronology of the discussion.)

A number of perspectives were shared, much of it revolving around whether or not a wide representation of faculty would feel able to offer Learning Outcome 3 First Year Seminars. It was questioned whether or not the matter of Peggy McIntosh's distinction between level 1, level 2, and level 3 courses were an appropriate standard and whether or not there was any real harm to having some of the First Year Seminars be a level 1 course. A committee member made the point that requiring the First Year Seminars to be a level 3 course would be setting the bar too high and would exclude faculty who would be genuinely interested in offering a Learning Outcome 3 First Year Seminar, albeit not at a level 3. Another committee member argued that we needed to avoid setting the bar too high and that we would be making an important, public commitment to Learning Outcome 3 by requiring the FYS to fulfill a Learning Outcome 3 requirement.

The discussion also turned to the matter of how the First Year Seminars or some other course/s would incorporate the mission of the Sisters of the Holy Cross. Julie S. made the point that, although she completely agrees that this content should be covered because (among other reasons) the mission of the Sisters is specifically referred to in Learning Outcome 3, she, nonetheless, could not envision how she would do so when reading the examples offered by one of the subcommittees. The point was made that many of us are already bringing in the mission of the Sisters into our courses without necessarily realizing that we are doing so. Julie S. argued that the examples given were actually content, not outcomes and were far more specific than Learning Outcome 3. She felt that when asked to create a course she needed to develop the specific content herself. A design team member next stated that reaching specified outcomes developed by someone else was precisely what she was required to do within the current departmental general education requirement.

Questions of pedagogy were raised by another committee member who referred to the model of the People and Justice course where there is a body of common texts from which faculty select texts and then conduct discussion sections with their own approach. Julie S. responded that the People and Justice course represented a different pedagogy, one that she is very comfortable with, namely a "Master Learner" pedagogy where the faculty member reads a common book with the students, a book on which s/he is not an "expert". In this pedagogy, the faculty member models to the students how to read critically and thoughtfully. Although very comfortable with that particular pedagogy (as well as others), she did not feel that this was the pedagogy that was inferred in the specified contents of the examples offered by one of the subcommittees in its rationale. A design team member suggested that perhaps we could have a dual system where a faculty member could elect to design a Learning Outcome 3 FYS herself or himself or could offer a course built around a set of common texts from which a faculty member would choose particular texts and then conduct a "master learner" FYS. Julie S. did not think that a dual system would work particularly well.

Julie S. then presented suggestions made by the students who were not that clear on the advantages of First Year Seminars and preferred creating various groups of courses (i.e. women's studies, intercultural competence, social responsibility) from which all students would be required to take one course. This led another committee member to express the view that many of our WOST courses (and perhaps JUST, and ICS) are not appropriate for first year students and that we needed to consider this before we started requiring first year students to take them. This brought the discussion back to the question of rationale with Mary Ann K. articulating some of the points of a developing rationale for FYS including improved success at college and the ability to develop critical thinking skills through the participation in small group discussion. This led another committee member to state that he saw many pragmatic obstacles to the creation of FYS that would require a significant reshaping of departmental introductory courses. Discussion returned to the students' suggestions, which also included required tandems or pairing two FYS (one Learning Outcome 1, another Learning Outcome 3) through a shared discussion group.

With people needing to leave, we quickly established a process for resolution with regard to the possible compromises, which were:


Compromise A

We recommend that there be a variety of First Year Seminars all of which address Learning Outcome 3 and that all first year students be required to take such a First Year Seminar. This requirement is established with the understanding that:

1) the committee approving First Year Seminars will be attentive to and assess the way that Learning Outcome 3 is being expressed through the First Year Seminars, and

2) should our experience with this design result in too few First Year Seminars or not allow for widespread departmental participation in First Year Seminars, the design will be modified so that First Year Seminars can, but need not, fulfill a Learning Outcome 3 requirement.

Compromise B

On the basis of the models developed by the General Education Committee as well as the significant level of support within our own Design Team, we will recommend that the Design Team for Learning Outcome 2 establish a required First Year Seminar, but we will not include them in our own design and we will ultimately leave the decision regarding First Year Seminars to them. We will inform the Learning Outcome 2 Design Team that their decision will determine whether or not we recommend a design with Freshman Seminars (all of which will fulfill a Learning Outcome 3 requirement) or a design that does not include First Year Seminars, but instead requires students to take one or more courses from a designated group(s) of courses.

Compromise on e-portfolios

Please indicate whether you approve or disapprove of the following compromise. If you disapprove please give a brief explanation (1 or 2 sentences only, please).

Since it has both strong supporters and strong detractors, we will not include a multi-year e-portfolio in our design. We will, however, recommend that a small pilot program be initiated after the new general education curriculum has been in place for one year so that the College can gauge its effectiveness through hands-on experience.



We determined that the process for resolution, namely a simple majority would decide which compromise we would adopt and would also decide the other votes (including the 2 or 1 question) that Julie Storme would send to us in a forthcoming email. In that email, she will also invite input regarding the students' suggestions and ask for volunteers to write rationales.

We set a meeting date of Thursday 2/21, place to be announced, and adjourned.