Saint Mary's College General Education

Present: Chris Cobb, Janet Fore, Kitty Green, Joe Incandela, Nancy Nekvasil, Charlie Peltier

---

We had no minutes to approve and no announcements.

We discussed the Gen Ed lunch to be held in Stapleton at noon on Wednesday, September 24, 2008. After some discussion, we decided to provide the critical thinking diagram with explanations of the six points to all people at tables with the idea that a first-year seminar would focus on critical thinking as an outcome. We will pose two questions: 1) can you live with this definition of critical thinking and the component outcomes listed? and 2) can you see yourself teaching a course that foregrounds these outcomes? Gen Ed committee members or DT co-chairs will take notes at the tables. We will not share table discussions orally, but rather we will conclude the lunch with a clicker session where participants vote on the two questions. We discussed having four choices for answers: yes, maybe, no, and don’t know. Kitty will prepare the document for the tables. Written discussion notes will be collected by the Gen Ed Committee.

We thought we might use a couple of questions for the next Gen Ed lunch if we have good feedback from this lunch. These might be something like: 1) could your department with its present curriculum teach a first-year seminar that foregrounds the critical thinking outcomes? and 2) what alterations would need to be made to make such a course work (assuming there would be support for making such changes)?

We will be meeting Thursday, Sept. 25 with RLST and PHIL to discuss the Gen Ed document as we currently know it. The place of this meeting will be announced later. Questions we might ask could include:

• can your introductory courses remain as they are with the current descriptions
  and outcomes?
  
• what do you want to see you majors have in breadth outside your discipline?
  
• how do you feel about cross-listing courses?
  
• what should your gen ed courses accomplish; what skills should they teach?
  
• Philosophy has a place in gen ed, but where does it fit in?
  
• how can your courses focus on skills?

We did not talk a lot about the Friday, Sept. 19 meeting with the social science faculty, but we did note a couple of points. One was that as a faculty, we need to learn about our colleagues’ expertise. Another was that some of the social science faculty believe their intro courses should not have to change for the new Gen Ed. And, no matter what else we heard, there was a sense of coalescing among the social scientists that can inform our future work.