Gen Ed Task Force Letter

Here is a letter from the task force for gen ed that Dr. A. sent to the faculty today:

Chancellor Achampong, We would greatly appreciate your assistance in distributing the below letter to all Penn State Mont Alto faculty.  Thank you for your assistance, and we look forward to talking with you about General Education again at ALC in the fall. Mary Beth, Maggie and Janet, Gen Ed Task Force Co-Chairs

Open Letter to All Penn State Faculty, After a year of conversation, the Gen Ed Task Force met in a two-day retreat on May 15 – 16th to bring together the comments and feedback that we have been hearing from the Penn State community. Opportunities and challenges of Gen Ed modernization at Penn State were the focus of the discussion. The task force agreed that our foremost goal is fostering student intellectual growth. Opportunities we have identified include:

  • leveraging the strengths of our faculty and better integrating general education teaching with research;
  • improving student learning and providing students with a context with which to understand the importance of general education;
  • promoting faculty collaboration and pedagogy development;
  • becoming a national leader in general education curriculum assessment and research

Challenges that the University community has raised in discussions, town hall meetings, focus groups, and on the website are identified below. We will be exploring ways to allay these challenges.

  • maintaining flexibility and mobility for students;
  • delivering the curriculum on all campuses, including World Campus;
  • achieving a good balance between continuity with what we have now and making changes to foster innovations and improvements;
  • supporting, incentivizing, and rewarding faculty participation in an excellent general education curriculum;
  • upholding strong academic standards;
  • securing ongoing resources for faculty and units to fund and maintain changes to the curriculum

We hear you! As a result of your feedback, the task force has decided to lengthen the timeline for the process so that we can do this right: instead of presenting a legislative report to the Faculty Senate during the fall, as planned earlier, this summer the task force will be developing several possible curriculum prototypes. These will be mapped against our learning objectives, and their implications for students, faculty, and staff will be examined. These prototypes and details will be made available on our website in the fall.  We will then be collecting feedback from the University community on the pros and cons of each through the web site and during meetings with faculty, staff, and students that will be scheduled. Each of the prototypes will be discussed and no recommendations to the Senate will be made until there has been sufficient time for input from, and deliberation with, the University community. We encourage you to follow the process, read the background literature and materials, learn about upcoming meetings, see how to get involved, and comment at the newly revised Gen Ed website – http://www.gened.psu.edu . With thanks for your continuing engagement, Janet Schulenberg, Maggie Slattery and Mary Beth Williams, Co-Chairs of the Gen Ed Task Force

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