What does not work in the current GE?
Submitted by the GE
CONCEPTUAL REASONS:
- The design of EVERY GE course must begin with an understanding of the purpose of the course:
How does it fit into the overall goals and outcomes of the general education or major curriculum?
Answering this question is key. “It is impossible to design a GE course -- or any other course for that matter -- without knowing how it fits into the bigger picture. Another way of stating this is that planning a course without this information is possible, but it likely won’t achieve its stated aims. (Hanstedt, 2012: 46)
Westmont has over 200 GE courses. How many of them were created with this stipulation in mind?
- We have significant overlap of major and GE courses and the purposes of major courses (developing discipline-specific skills and competencies) and the general education courses (developing transferable foundational skills and competencies) are not the same. If we try to “blend” GE and major purposes in the same course, this approach “is likely to create more work for instructors and lead to more frustration – and less productive learning – for students” (Hanstedt, 2012: 45; 51-53)
- Although it is true that many thrive on focusing our energy on a narrowly defined topics, which is not the real world for which we are preparing our students. Employers are looking for graduates with the ability to adapt to rapidly a shifting landscape and who can find solutions to “wicked problems” -- in terms of Edmond Ko, a scholar from the Hong Kong University of Science of Technology-- by moving beyond the known and familiar into unanticipated or unfamiliar and applying skills and competencies learned in one context to other contexts. “Knowledge that is taught in a variety of contexts is more likely to support flexible transfer than the knowledge that is taught in a single context” (Bransford, 2000: 236). Hence, it is important – if not imperative -- for the GE curriculum to be intentionally interdisciplinary[1]and/or integrative.[2] Our current GE curriculum does not effectively support interdisciplinary thinking.
- Below are two major paradigms currently used in higher education (Barr & Tagg, 1995: 25).Which of them is more applicable to our GE curriculum?
Instructional Paradigm / Learning Paradigm
Mission and Purpose
- Provide/deliver instruction
- Transfer knowledge from faculty to students
- Offer course and programs
- Produce learning
- Elicit students’ discovery and construction of knowledge
- Create powerful learning environments
Criteria for success
- Quality of inputs (entering students)
- Quantity and quality of resources
- Learning and student success outcomes
- Quality of existing students
PRACTICAL REASONS:
- The current GE program presents a challenge for students to navigate.
- According to the 2010 GE Senior Students Survey and 2012-2013 WCSA officer GE questionnaire,overall students perceive our current GE as achecklist that needs to be completed rather than an integrated and transformative learning experience.
- The results of the 2011-2012 institutional/GE assessment of Writing Across the Curriculum suggested that we are best at teaching style and that this emphasis may not be serving students’ rhetorical development as well as it should. Both,the Lead Assessment Specialist in her 2011-2012 General Education Assessment of Written Communication report and the GE Committee in its 2012 Annual Assessment Update report recommended developing the First-Year Seminar as a programmatic measure for addressing this issue with student learning. However, we do not have room in the current GE curriculum for this structural addition.
- There is no room in the current GE curriculum for interdisciplinary teaching and learning, service learning, experiential learning, and other high impact practices.
- 56% of respondents of the GE Faculty Survey administered in April 2011 stated in response to the question “What habits of mind do we most want to cultivate in students, especially in their first and second years at Westmont?” identified and competencies that can be categorized as critical thinking skills. Moreover, according to the 2009 AACU survey in which the employers were presented with 17 possible university-wide learning outcomes and asked to state which ones they felt college should place more emphasis on, 81% of respondents support “Developing critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” outcome. And yet, it is not clear where exactly the teaching and learning of higher order thinking occursin our GE curriculum. According to the 2010-2011 CLA test results, our first year students demonstrate better results in critical thinking than senior students thus suggesting the negative value added by Westmont education in this important area. Again, this issue can be addressed in the first year seminar, for which we currently do not have room in our GE curriculum.
- We need to have a sustainable and manageable assessment of our GE curriculum which should be instrumental in improving student learning, insightful and meaning for faculty, and consistent with WASC standards in order to keep accreditation from WASC. At present, it is an attainable goal as out GE curriculum is unmanageable.
- Our current GE is credit-heavy, which creates problems for science students, students from high unit majors interested in taking an elective course, or students pursuing double major.
- It is impossible to conduct regular GE syllabus review for 20 GE areas.
- Due to their excessive number of GE SLOs,they cannot be mapped effectively on the ILOs outcome. We do not have a GE Curriculum Map either, which is one of the WASC requirements.
- The GE curriculum does not appear or support dynamic new teaching or professional development opportunities for Westmont faculty.
[1]Interdisciplinary refers to programs, courses, or assignments that put together two or more distinct fields.
[2]Integrativemore often refers to acknowledging the interdisciplinary that already exists in a given field or topic (Hansteadt, 2012:13).