Here’s an email from Renee Borromeo, one of the campus senators:
I have been at University Park all day for a General Education Task Force retreat and I’d like to share some information with you. This process is chugging along at a pretty good clip, so we should all be interested in what’s happening. The General Education Task Force met on January 9th, 2014 and approved the following principles:
For an individual student, no course in a theme may also be counted for their primary major.
All Penn State students are expected to have achieved a minimum level of numeracy prior to graduation.
The first year of the General Education curriculum will be an introductory experience in which the learning objectives focus on cultivating foundational abilities in speaking, writing, visual and digital communication, and on developing the habits of public deliberation necessary for the engaged citizens of the twenty-first century.
(I cut and pasted that statement from the Gen Ed website, which I strongly encourage you to visit.) http://sites.psu.edu/genedatpsu/about/
Other items that were discussed:
- There is a possibility that the number of required gen ed credits for a 4-year degree might be reduced from 45 to 36. I asked about 2-year programs and the chair admitted the larger task force had not done much to consider 2-year programs. (My guess is that 2-year programs will either just do the exploratory part of the gen ed program or have a mini-theme, possibly totally within the major.)
- There will be some gen ed credits that will have to be related to a theme (maybe as few as 6 or as many as 15) and some that will be exploratory, similar to what all the gen ed credits are now.
- The task force has no intention of creating and mandating particular themes. These are to be generated by the faculty. Right now, the only real mechanism in place for this kind of discussion is on the gen ed web page, which has links to blogs and twitter.
- Town hall meetings with campuses and other units are being planned for the spring, although no dates have been set.
- The timeline is pretty aggressive. The task force will present a forensic report to the University Faculty Senate in March. A legislative report will be presented in Oct 2014, at which time the UFS will vote. The plan is to have a plan approved and in place by fall 2015, so that classes can be scheduled for fall 2016 when implementation will take place. The incoming freshmen in 2016 will start with the new gen ed curriculum. All other students will continue with the present menu-type gen ed curriculum.
- The idea of a capstone project or engaged scholarship experience in the senior year seems to be gaining traction. It might be that a student needs to be involved in such a project either in their major or in their gen ed curriculm, but not necessarily in both.
- The task force really wants faculty input and really wants this to be a faculty-driven change. The website is being revamped to make it easier for faculty (and staff, and students, and students’ families, and anyone else who wants to weigh in) to be involved in the conversation.
If you want to see the introductory powerpoint from this morning, I’ve attached it. If there are questions, I will be happy to answer any I can, or take any that I can’t back to the committee. There are still more questions than answers at this point. These proposed changes will affect all of us, so we need to be part of the conversation in order ensure the changes will have a positive impact on the student and faculty experience at Mont Alto.
One more thought: If anyone wants to have an informal discussion about Gen Eds and the changes being proposed, I’d be willing to schedule a time and place for such a meeting. Let me know if you are interested.
Thanks for reading.
Renee