Excerpted from the GERTF SACS Enhancement Report:

Self-Directive Recommendations for the Process of Revising the General Education Program at UNCA

Unlike other committees in the SACS Enhancement Self Study, which are charged to make recommendations for other programs and departments to carry out, the GERTF is charged to make recommendations for the General Education program and for carrying out a design for revising and implementing a curriculum. Curricular design and implementation in the field of General Education involves time, requiring the solicitation of feedback from a wide range of campus and community constituencies, the consideration of a complex organizational environment, and the engagement with various institutional cultures. Pedagogy, educational philosophy, historical practice, and institutional politics all play a role in the successful design and implementation of General Education reform. As a consequence, the GERTF has decided to shape these recommendations as a set of directives for its future work.

The GERTF should:

· Discuss the size of the current program, with particular attention paid to the balance of credit hours devoted to General Education, the majors, and electives. Study the issue of Absolutely Free Electives (AFE), and particularly the ways in which the general education curriculum and the majors may reduce the AFEs students are able to take.

· Explore the advantages and disadvantages of core, distribution, and mixed models for a revision of the General Education program.

· Study current models for and practices in the assessment of General Education programs. Examine how best to build assessment into the revised curricular design.

· Examine the pedagogical implications for General Education revision and curricular organization, paying close attention to key program elements that include but are not limited to Learning Communities, First-Year Experience, the Honors Program, Undergraduate Research, and Service Learning. GERTF will study the pedagogical implications for the university’s instructional delivery mechanisms.

· Examine the current practice of using introduction courses to the major as a part of the General Education curriculum. Study the practice of requiring students in the major to use or substitute general education courses to satisfy requirements in the major. Examine inconsistencies in the way majors allow students to by-pass or not to by-pass requirements so as to limit the number of general education courses students have the opportunity to take.

· Study the comparative merits of discrete courses v. across-the-curriculum approaches to constructing the General Education program, specifically as they apply to current or future writing, research, and diversity requirements.

· Examine models for and the implications of a diversity requirement. Study the ways other peer institutions and universities nation-wide define the concept of diversity in its curricular and pedagogical senses. Compare these definitions with those provided in the report from the Chancellor’s Taskforce on Diversity. Devise a clear definition of what UNCA means by diversity, so that faculty and students have a clearer sense of its role in any curricular revision. How we define diversity in terms of content and pedagogy may affect how departments and faculty can develop and innovate in order best to serve the institution’s larger mission.

· Examine models for and the implications of a Service Learning requirement. Consider Service Learning in its applied sense to include internships, projects in the community, etc.

· Explore models for and the implications of including a senior project or capstone experience in the General Education program.

· Explore the issues of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity for the design of a revised General Education program. Devise a clear definition of what UNCA means by interdisciplinarity: how we define interdiscplinary approaches, content, and pedagogy may affect how departments can shape connections to other departments and programs.

· Study the advantages and disadvantages of distributing the courses in a revised General Education curriculum across 2 and 4 years. GERTF will consider the corollary issues of course sequencing, pacing, and prerequisites as part of its examination of this larger matter.

· Consider the implications of transfer credits and the state articulation agreement for the design and implementation of a revised General Education program.

· Examine the implications of Student Development for the design and implementation of a revised General Education curriculum.

· Study the implications of the new Minimum Admissions Requirements for future curricular design.