Greg Cashman

Phil Creighton

Jane Dané

Tom Erskine

Mike Garner

Ben Greene

Steve Hetzler

Victoria Hutchinson

Fred Kundell

Jim Lackie

Robert Long

Chapman McGrew

Pat Richards

Fatollah Saliman

Kathleen Shannon

Sarah Sharbach

Debra Thatcher

Gail Welsh

Arlene White

George Whitehead

Ellen Whitford

Bill Zak Members Not Attending:

Mike Boolukos

Robert Smith

Announcements:

Some possible conference ideas:

• AACU, Washington DC - January 15-17, 1998: Annual Meeting
• University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL - January 8-11, 1998: Transforming Campuses into Learning Communities
• AACU Work conference, Tampa, FL - February 12-14, 1998: Discover What Works in General Education
• University Planning Day, January 23, 1998

Anyone who is interested in possibly attending one of these conferences, send your name to Pat Richards ASAP.

Minutes were approved as amended.

Jim Lackie has arranged a special section in the library for Gen Ed literature. Jim will distribute bibliography will continue to update.

Check the Gen Ed Web site.

Reviewed handouts briefly. Read for next meeting

Assignments for next week:

Look for ideas for speakers and topics for faculty development sessions.

Develop your short list of knowledge, skills, and dispositions attributes for next meeting.

Procedures for voting were discussed:

The following points were made:

1. The issues that are decided by this committee will be limited in scope.

2. There are two issues types that will be discussed - procedural and substantive.

The following methodology was approved:

• Simple majority on procedural issues
• Consensus on substantive issues.

The Time Line was discussed and issues were brought to the table:

• K. Shannon: Open hearings need to be held and information sent to the Senate and/or Curriculum committees
• P. Creighton: The time line must have concise objectives for Year 1 with more general objectives for year 2 and 3 which will be reevaluated in terms of outcomes and results from Year 1.
• Mike Garner: The method for evaluating and choosing models needs to be more defined in years 2 and 3.
• K. Shannon: Clarification that the pilot program will run parallel with current general ed requirements beginning in Fall 1999/Spring 2000
• V. Hutchinson: Cited information from the College of New Jersey. Initially, put 2 core courses into the curriculum and then by the 5th year we should be able to define the criteria for qualifying a course as a fulfillment course for a gen ed requirement. The idea is to limit the number of brand new courses but find opportunities for collaboration and integration of gen ed req's.
• Suggested that the first pilot occur in Fall 1999 using summer and spring to gear up, followed by the second pilot in Spring 2000 using fall and winter to gear up.
• Asheville suggested offering a regional interdisciplinary course such as the Chesapeake Bay integrating art, literature, history, culture, economics.
• Spring 1998 - we may have seen a model that we like that has one particular course in it that is of interest to us. We might be able to run that our model of that course as a special topics course to see how well if flies.
• F. Kundell: This is a very tentative schedule
• S. Hetzler: All of the time line components are optional as necessary. Some may never happen at all.
• J. Lackie: May keep all the gen ed classes that we have currently and simply make minor adjustments to them.
• B. Zak: What is the time line - a rough draft for the campus or a promise .
• F. Kundell: Whatever we do, we must keep the faculty involved in the process.
• B. Zak: Suggested that we restrict ourselves to page 1 of the time line and create a subcommittee or charge Phil's office with a study on:

The Cost of implementation

Practical ability on delivery of the product

What is workable within the idea framework

Reasonable explanation of deliverables

• P. Richards: Whatever we decide, we need to have an endpoint, a goal to work towards.
• B. ZAK: Closure is important but time is a large variable
• M. Garner: It takes a minimum of 1 year to develop a multi disciplinary course, more like 18 months.
• Use Jerry Gaff and other presenters as an opportunity to open discussion from the campus, although we will want to have discussion sessions when the 'guru' is not present.
• Need to set up a list of issues that bring the issue to a dialogue - Everyone should think about possible topics and speakers to schedule. Bring your names and suggestions next week.
• The revised Time line needs to be distributed to the campus - See attachment:
• P. Creighton suggested an overnight retreat to build camaraderie. It will be on January 21 and 22. P. Creighton's office will coordinate. Possible locations: Ocean City or Wye Mills.
• The committee will need to look at the mechanics of transfer and articulation agreements
• For next week: review the Mission statement along with the Vision, Values/Outcomes also in context of Gen Ed requirements.
• Discussed the concept of knowledge, skills and dispositions and which are the important issues that emerged from the last meeting's exercise:

Ability to think interdisciplinary manner

Rubrics must cross disciplines

Must be seen in a more broad and general application of knowledge and skills.

Use different lenses to see same issues differently

• It is exciting to students when vocabulary crosses disciplines and they can make connections.
• General Ed needs to be broadly interconnected and the faculty need to be more purposeful
• It is easy to assess knowledge, but hard to assess ability to reason in an interdisciplinary method.
• Part of the problem is a question of deliverance. How that broad base of knowledge is imparted into the student. Students can approach the same problems differently and the relationship to the different modes of inquiry must be recognizable.
• Gen Ed goal is to get the student to recognize the possible contributions of others and to synthesize the material. The ability to assess a subject does not require a discrete set of knowledge about the subject, but a guide or process of looking at things.
• Integrative learning - Disciplines strive to isolate problems down to a level where the problem can be controlled and assessed.
• What about the idea of Advanced General Ed- where students should recognize the connections between course, people and cultures.
• Not all of these recognition skills come from Gen Ed but you can use Gen Ed courses as a prerequisite to courses to build more strongly developed process and skills.
• We need to assess what we have currently
• Develop for next meeting a list of indicators or 'must haves' that a student should leave SSU with...these indicators are the ones that you are willing to go to the mat for... Ex. IDIS courses, capstones etc.
• Gen Ed should not be limited to Fresh/Soph years - it is good to mix upper and lower classmates.
• P. Creighton indicated that he wanted to look more closely at the Cal State University of Monterey Bay and their University Learning Requirements. It is a way to create a commonality among subjects and fit them into your major.

Hand outs:

Common Attributes: One Person's View - Greg Cashman

Publication list for General Education Task Force

General Education Circle

Conceptualizing an Outcomes Oriented General Education Curriculum by Don Farmer

Interdisciplinary General Education by Julie Klein

What's Julie's 'Must Read' List? By Julie Klein

Diploma's and Degrees are Obsolescent by Donald Langenberg (Chronicle of Higher Ed)