General Education Review Committee
Meeting, 17 April 2000
Red Oak Room, RL, 4:30-5:30 pm


Minutes

Present: Bruce, Dohse, Friedenberg, Hardy, Konz, Krumpe, McKnight, Moseley, Nelms, Pons, Rizzo, Ruiz, Sabo, Stuart, White-Carter, Katz


1.     We began the meeting with the distribution of Dr. Friedenberg's email response to some questions Dr. Katz had sent to her as a result of our last meeting. Included in her response were some very insightful observations about three types of learning goals we were looking to General Education to provide: 1) basic college-level competencies in key areas; 2) sampling of disciplines across different divisions; and 3) fostering awareness of connections among the disciplines through interdisciplinary experiences. Lisa's post went on to note that our discussions of general education were "very molecular, focusing on specific skills and contents." She went on to suggest that we might benefit by thinking "at a molar level, to see whether there are types of goals that might help us categorize facets of General Education. The three above are what I see in our discussions so far but it is quite possible that others have different perceptions. Once we agree on some types of broader goals, we could take each component of General Education separately and see how those goals translate into classes…" In discussing Lisa's observations, it was noted that sampling disciplines was important but not an end in itself. The question was asked, should we totally structure general education in order to engineer intellectual epiphanies? Opinion was divided on this issue, with some of us contending that we ought to provide opportunities for such experiences and others arguing that, while we might not be able "to engineer" such moments, we might greatly increase the likelihood of their occurrence if we were to revise the curriculum in certain ways. Rebecca Bruce cited a text in her field that she thought might offer in her field the sorts of experiences we were discussing (Great Ideas in Computer Science): the book explored the conditions (scientific, intellectual, cultural, etc.) necessary for certain transformations in computer science to take place. 

2.     At this point, we began to discuss interdisciplinarity more generally. We talked about our experiences with interdisciplinary studies as students. We moved on two discuss two particular issues in thinking about interdisciplinary studies: 1) what makes a course or a curriculum interdisciplinary? 2) what prevents faculty from engaging in interdisciplinary teaching, and how might they be encouraged to do more of it? 

This was a very interesting part of the meeting, engendering some lively dialogue. We discussed the ways in which our Humanities Program fulfilled and did not fulfill what we have in mind when thinking about interdisciplinary study. It was suggested that we might be able to restructure the Humanities Program or even revise it deeply in order to create a more interdisciplinary experience for our students. 

It was observed that there was more than one way to create an interdiscplinary experience: 1) a single course may incorporate more than one disciplinary approach to its subject matter; 2) a course may be taught by a team of faculty from different disciplines; or 3) a set of courses may take as its subject matter a single problem and each faculty member would then teach the course within the boundaries of his or her discipline, making connections when appropriate to the methodologies and content of the other courses. This latter approach would require faculty to plan their course set in advance and to meet at regular intervals, in order to coordinate what was happening in their respective courses and to learn from each other how their disciplines consider their subject matter in unique ways. It was observed that resource issues often work against team teaching models [option (2) above] and that faculty hesitation to move into unknown territory without requisite expertise often works against a truly interdisciplinary course [option (1) above].

This led us into a discussion of how we might make interdisciplinary studies more attractive to faculty. We discussed the problem of bringing expertise and depth into teaching in an interdisciplinary mode. As we concluded the meeting, it was suggested that we continue this line of inquiry.

3.     Our next meeting will be Wednesday, 3 May, 4:30-5:30, in the Red Oak Room, in Ramsey Library. We will continue discussing the idea of interdisciplinary studies and its connection to general education. This will be the last meeting of the semester.