The Gen-Ed committee consists of nine faculty and staff members from a variety of different departments throughout the campus and has been meeting consistently every ten days since the fall of 2009.
The committee plans to have an official and formal plan to present to the faculty by the fall 2010 semester. If accepted by faculty, the plan would run through the approval process by the curriculum committee and administration, with hopes to have an approval by the spring of 2011, according to Gerald Burns, co-chair of the Gen-Ed committee.
The current I&C core has been instilled in the university since the 1991 academic year and has had minor changes since then.
Many are calling for an urgent change to the system in order to improve overall student satisfaction. “It’s been 19 years, it [I&C] ran its course,” said Burns. “The theme of Individual and Community was never embraced fully by faculty and students as the designers had hoped.”
The amount of flexibility between transferring classes as well as student options is a main concern students have when considering a new core of education. “Some of the flaws with it are the current lack of choice for students. I think that’s personally the main flaw, and I also think that is what has lead to both faculty as well as student dissatisfaction, which has made these courses less affective,” said Andrea Bergstrom, Gen-Ed committee member.
Some key goals for the new core curriculum are to look at ideas which will help assist in students gaining a more well rounded educational experience.
If approved it would mean that the new core courses would also relate and connect to major requirement courses, which could ultimately result in reshaping of major requirements, according to Karen Brown, co-chair of the Gen-Ed committee. “Our committee has felt very strongly that one of the mistakes of the past was the Gen-ed was thought as a separate regime. There’s a split between Gen-ed and the education in [students’] majors; we felt it would be important to think in terms of a holistic education,” Burns said. Essentially, this shows that there will be changes made to major requirements that connect with the gen-ed.
Bergstrom, along with other committee members, has been working towards the idea of pedagogy, where the committee is reviewing the overall student perception of learning by forming focus groups. “One of the mistakes with the previous Gen-Ed regime is that students weren’t consulted in any way and the reaction was pretty extreme,” Burns said. “While we haven’t made this formal, we’d think we’d like SGA to look at this and approve it or endorsement parallel [to] submitting it for approval with faculty.”
Another goal for the new set of core classes is hopes that students gain more from these classes and staff and faculty focus more on the Gen-Ed. “One of the big splits is sort of disciplinary loyalty—a sense of the major’s what’s important and other stuff [I&C] has to be gotten out of the way. Students take their major courses more seriously, that’s more of a reflection of genuine interdisciplinary,” said Burns.
According to the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) 89 percent of higher education institutions are currently reviewing and redesigning their core Gen-Ed courses.
The Gen-Ed committee has been chosen to take part in a summer seminar hosted by the AACU and send a team of faculty members to take part in a seminar with national experts and people from other institutions to help get ideas and advice for a new core curriculum.
While trying to instill future goals, the committee is looking at how to include courses being offered online and at satellite campuses while still trying to connect to “the entire experience” of a Franklin Pierce education. “We’ve been thinking about the application of our General-Education program to CGPS centers,” Brown said. “We have the people who take courses online but they’re a different population so how do you make something applicable to different diversities.”
“This is an exciting time for Franklin Pierce. We are small university, but have the capacity to change rapidly and adopt new delivery systems, programming,” said Jason Little, Gen-Ed committee member. “Many large institutions, including state university systems, take years to plan and create change. I anticipate a new Gen-Ed program will emerge that will attract students, and other higher Education institutions will grow to admire.”
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