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


Minutes

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

1. The Asheville Institute has formally accepted the UNCA Team to participate in this summer's program. Our team will focus on drafting a preliminary set of objectives for our discussions in the fall and on developing a strategy for building consensus across all divisions of the University. We will work on developing a structure by which we might create a campus-wide discussion of general education, bringing together a diverse range of campus constituencies, including students, faculty, and administration. In addition, we plan to examine the comparative advantages of core-curricular and distribution-credit approaches to general education, which we have already commented on in our discussions from time to time this spring.

2. We continued our discussion from the last meeting, this time beginning by asking what it is that we hope to accomplish through the Arts program at UNCA. Among the various objectives mentioned were the following: As a result of the Arts component of the curriculum, students should gain a knowledge of how art communicates its themes; students should acquire a greater understanding of how a work of art evokes or comments on the spirit of the age in which it is produced; students should gain a knowledge of aesthetics and the formal elements of composition. 

We discussed at length the assertion that students should gain an appreciation of art and how it contributes qualitatively to our lives. Some of us thought that this was a more difficult goal to achieve because appreciation is perhaps less teachable or less capable of being assessed, either in terms of teaching success or learning. 

This got us into a discussion of the idea that we might approach general education goals in terms of what students might derive from their learning experiences in a general education program. We explored the idea that there are two values derived from engagement in learning: an "intrinsic value," which relates to the inner experience students derive from their learning, and "extrinsic value," which relates to more concrete and measurable learning that takes place, as in the enhancement of communication skills, the mastery of a body of knowledge that can be applied to problem solving or the critique of truth claims, etc. We discussed the idea that the purpose of a liberal arts education and general education in particular is to give students the tools to develop a sense of intrinsic value. Some of us thought that we should seek to give students the "opportunities" to develop this sense of intrinsic value, but leave it up to them whether or not to take advantage of these opportunities. Others of us thought that such opportunities ought to be built into the general education program. It was generally agreed that the categories of intrinsic and extrinsic values were useful for our conversation and that we might return to them again in the future.

We also discussed the idea that "communication" was a theme or subject matter common to all areas of general education. All disciplines and approaches to knowledge, we observed, engaged the issue of communication, that is, the understanding of a body of knowledge, the transmission of this knowledge, and the ability to evaluate a claim to knowledge.

As the meeting came to a close, it was observed that our discussion seemed to suggest that general education should possibly be stacked toward the second half of a student's education (the junior and senior years) or distributed evenly throughout the four years. The question was raised of whether we might be calling on general education to do to much in terms of testing and teaching competency in the areas of skills and basic knowledge. We discussed the idea that entering students might be expected to possess basic skills and knowledge, or, if they do not, that they be required to take courses to bring them up to speed. These courses would not count toward satisfying the general education requirements. We thought that we should pick up these issues in our next meeting.

3. Our next meetings will be:

--M 4/17, 4:30-5:30pm, Red Oak Rm.
--W 5/3, 4:30-5:30pm, Red Oak Rm.