General Education Review Task Force
Meeting, 28 March 2001
Red Oak Room, 4:30-5:30 pm

Minutes

Present: Faculty--Bruce, Dohse, Hardy, Konz, Krumpe, Moseley, Pons, Nelms; Students--Spencer, Wilde-Ramsing; Alumni--Proctor. [Members on off-campus scholarly assignment/leave: Mike Ruiz, Tracey Rizzo]

1. Thanks to Grant Hardy for taking over and leading the meeting in my absence. What follows is a write up of the minutes he provided. 

2. Methodology for going into departments, programs, and offices: It was suggested that we start our "listening project" with the following departments: Computer Science, Art, Political Science, Chemistry, and Management. This seems to represent a fair cross-sample of departments involved in or affected by the General Education curriculum. This first set of meetings will allow us the opportunity to fine-tune how we can best conduct our future efforts and meet the needs of the various campus constituencies. 

It seems like a good idea to visit with program chairs and associated faculty, even if those professors are actually housed in other departments. Thus, some faculty may receive a couple invitations to offer their opinions--probably a good idea given the difficulty of trying to work around everyone's schedules.

After this first round of talks, the teams can report on their experiences to the GERTF as a whole, and then we can divide everyone into teams to carry out the rest of the visits. 

It seemed like a good idea to put comments from batches of five or six departments on the web-page, both to let people know what we are discovering and also to provide opportunities for corrective feedback from people who may feel that we misunderstood their positions.

3. Student involvement in gathering information: There was some discussion of how students should be involved in this information gathering stage, and it was generally agreed that it might be best to solicit their opinions separately from the faculty. We might ask department chairs to ask about General Education in their senior exit interviews, but an even better approach may be to ask Hum 414 instructors to give a short set of three or four open-ended questions to survey students about their experiences in the General Education program (to take no more that 10 to 15 minutes). This would give us a broad sample of opinion from students who have completed the entire General Education program. It would be possible to put this together this semester (the trailer sections) and then again in the Fall--which would give us feedback from most of the senior class.