Saint Mary's College General Education

Present: Chris Cobb, Janet Fore, Joe Incandela, Michael Kramer, Nancy Nekvasil, Charlie Peltier, Laurel Thomas

Guest: Jessica Ickes

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The meeting began with a discussion about how to incorporate the skills in the colored arcs of the design. There were four possibilities initially presented:

1. Assign particular skills to particular slots
   
2. Allow skills to be free-standing (requiring a grid for LO2 much like the one for LO3)
   
3. Assign particular skills to arms of the cross
   
4. Eliminate at least some skills from the final design

Option 1 might be regarded by instructors as too constrictive. Option 2 would introduce a whole other layer of complexity into the design, which could well be regarded as burdensome by both faculty and students. Option 3 is somewhat of the middle ground between Options 1 & 2, though has the disadvantage of assigning ownership of the skills to no one in particular. Option 4 was regarded as a step away from the learning outcomes endorsed by the faculty, which contain these skills.

The consensus was that we needed to speak with the faculty to find out where instruction in these skills reliably appears. If we find that all the skills are covered, we would not need to track them explicitly. But before we go to the faculty (perhaps at the August Faculty Development Day), the GenEd committee needs to work on learning outcomes for these skills.

The balance of the meeting was spent working on learning outcomes for the Professional Arts slot. Work on this will continue at the next meeting. Given our pace, we may decide to split up into two groups to draft learning outcomes for the other two arms.