Saint Mary's College General Education

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


Guest: Jessica Ickes

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I. Minutes approved

II. We tabled a return to the “Careful Reading/Textual Interpretation” skill description (which was the subject of an email exchange) for a future meeting.

III. Committee members discussed what role we expect skills outcomes to play in the new curriculum. This included how and whether they would be tracked and assessed, and what their relationship would be to particular slots. The question becomes more complicated because we lack any programmatic assessment tool (such as an eportfolio) that could validate skills acquired across various elements of the student’s four years at Saint Mary’s. Discussion centered around the following possibilities:

1. Skills are free-floating and tracked on a course-by-course basis.
   
   
   
   • Pros: Not burdensome to faculty teaching particular courses (viz., they do not have to include additional components to have courses approved for particular slots)
     
   • Cons: Very complicated to administer (would create an additional alphabet soup for Banner), and perhaps be just as complicated for advisors and students to navigate
     
   
   
2. Skills are attached to particular curricular slots.
   
   
   
   • Pros: Administratively easier––skills would reside in reliable homes
     
   • Cons: Potentially burdensome to faculty because planning and approval for courses would be tied to additional inclusion of particular skills
     
   
   
3. Skills are assumed to be acquired and not formally tracked.
   
   
   
   • Pros: No administrative footprint whatsoever
     
   • Cons: Loss of intentionality in the curriculum, and difficulty in assessing student attainment of the skills (viz., if we don’t know where the skills live, it becomes more difficult to find them)
     

IV. We decided to continue our definitions of the various skills and attempt to incorporate some of the above issues into the GenEd Lunch on September 23rd.