General Education Review Committee Report April 11, 2007 Committee Members: William Felice, Chair Anne J Cox Barney Hartston Table of Contents Part One: Eckerd College and the National Debate on General Education........................ 3 I. The “Ruling Ideas” of General Education at Eckerd College ..................................... 3 A. The Unification of Knowledge .............................................................................. 4 B. A Values-Based Education..................................................................................... 5 II. A Liberal Arts Education at Eckerd College.............................................................. 6 III. The National Debate on General Education ............................................................. 8 A. Preparation for Citizenship .................................................................................. 10 B. Living with Diversity ........................................................................................... 11 C. Moral Reasoning .................................................................................................. 12 D. Living in a More Global Society.......................................................................... 14 Short List of Substantive Recommendations.................................................................... 16 Part Two: New Directions for General Education at Eckerd College .............................. 17 I. Guiding Principles of an Eckerd College Liberal Arts Education............................. 17 II. First Year and Capstone Models .............................................................................. 20 A. The First Year Program........................................................................................ 20 Model One: The “Citizenship Course” and Spring Seminar Clusters .................. 23 Model Two: Themed 70/30 Courses..................................................................... 27 B. Capstone Course: Quest For Meaning ................................................................. 30 III. Breadth Requirements and Perspectives................................................................. 32 A. Required Service Learning Course / Project........................................................ 32 B. Required Science Lab Course .............................................................................. 35 C. Guidelines/Norms for “G” and “E” Perspectives................................................. 37 D. Guidelines/Norms for Breadth Requirements...................................................... 38 E. CPS Requirement ................................................................................................. 39 IV. Skill Development Rubrics and Guidelines............................................................ 39 A. Writing Proficiency.............................................................................................. 39 B. Oral Proficiency ................................................................................................... 41 C. Information Literacy ............................................................................................ 43 D. Quantitative Literacy............................................................................................ 45 E. Foreign Language Proficiency ............................................................................. 46 1 V. Faculty and Student Development ........................................................................... 47 A. Faculty Development ........................................................................................... 47 B. Student Development ........................................................................................... 49 VI. Staffing ................................................................................................................... 51 VII. Process................................................................................................................... 55 Part Three: Feedback on General Education .................................................................... 56 I. Faculty Feedback on General Education................................................................... 56 II. Student Feedback on General Education ................................................................. 64 III. A National Review of General Education Programs .............................................. 69 2 Part One: Eckerd College and the National Debate on General Education I. The “Ruling Ideas” of General Education at Eckerd College The Association of American Colleges (AAC) asserts that a strong general education (GE) program reflects the central educational values and commitments of the institution as a whole. Schools with well-built programs are very clear on the “Ruling Idea” or “common aim” which the GE program intends to realize. The AAC also notes that the absence of clarity, the inclusion of too many purposes, or too many compromises in the design makes effective implementation of a GE program very difficult.1 GE defines the essence of a liberal arts college, providing its overarching intellectual framework, purpose and goals. Harvard President Derek Bok describes the common aim of GE as the attempt colleges make “to awaken intellectual interests and help undergraduates comprehend the world and their place in it with a greater breadth of understanding than they could achieve by concentrating on a single discipline or special field of study.”2 Philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls on colleges and universities committed to the liberal arts to focus their GE curriculum on the development of the following three abilities: 1) the capacity for critical examination of oneself and one’s own traditions— what Socrates called the examined life; 2) the ability to think of oneself as what Stoic philosophers called a “citizen of the world”; and 3) the ability to develop a “narrative imagination,” which is the ability to try to understand what it might be like to experience life from a position other than one’s own.3 Many versions of GE have been taught over the years at Eckerd College with titles ranging from “Western Civilization and Its Christian Heritage,” “Inquiry and Human Nature,” “Modes of Learning,” “Values and the Search for Spirit,” “Christian Faith and the Great Issues,” “Western Heritage One and Two,” and “Western Heritage in a Global Context” (WHGC) combined with “Quest for Meaning” (QFM). However, throughout all of these variations, there has been a consistent “ruling idea” or “common aim” in the GE program at our school. To a large extent, the underlying philosophy of GE at Eckerd attempts to embrace the principles of breadth of understanding and critical examination promoted by Bok and Nussbaum. We find two central “ruling ideas” guiding the Eckerd College GE program from its founding under the leadership of Dean John Bevan to the current period under the guidance of Dean Lloyd Chapin.4 The two core “ruling ideas” are: (1) the importance of a common educational experience based on the centrality of the unification of 1 Association of American Colleges, “Strong Foundations: Twelve Principles for Effective General Education Programs,” 1994. 2 Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 256. 3 Martha Nussbaum, “Foreword,” in Alive at the Core: Exemplary Approaches to General Education in the Humanities, ed. Michael Nelson and Associates (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), xiv. 4 See Lloyd W. Chapin, “The Core Curriculum at Eckerd College,” in Alive at the Core, 96-122. 3 knowledge; and (2) the importance of a values-based education to build moral character and good citizenship. These two core principles embody our institutional mission. In 1945, Harvard published General Education in a Free Society, known as the “Red Book” because of the color of its binding. In 2007, the Red Book is arguably still the most influential study of the liberal arts in the US. This prominent study argues for both of the goals upon which Eckerd has built its GE program—the unification of knowledge and a values-based education. The Red Book, for example, states: “The heart of the problem of a general education is the continuance of the liberal and humane tradition. Neither the mere acquisition of information nor the development of special skills and talents can give the broad basis of understanding which is essential if our civilization is to be preserved…Unless the educational process includes at each level of maturity some continuing contact with those fields in which value judgments are of prime importance, it must fall far short of the ideal.”5 A. The Unification of Knowledge “Ruling Ideas” of GE at Eckerd College: • Unification of Knowledge The first “ruling idea” is to expose our students to the “unification of • Values-Based Education knowledge” and provide a common educational experience for students regardless of their field of specialization. John Bevan, the founding dean of faculty who played a key role in the development of the curriculum wrote, “Underlying the design of the core program is the conviction that knowledge is unified and that at the heart of the academic experience there should be a unified, rather than departmentalized, approach to understanding.”6 Dean Chapin notes that “the inclusion of subject matter from the humanities, the arts, and the social and natural sciences