Present: Faculty—Bruce, Dohse, Hardy, Konz, Krumpe, Lee, McKnight, Moseley, Pons, Nelms, Rizzo, Ruiz, White-Carter, Katz; Students—Spencer

1. Katz welcomed GERTF members back from summer break and thanked them for their willingness to continue on the task force.

2. Listening projects and rationale—A handout was distributed, describing the rationale for the listening project and listing the 5 questions for departments to consider. Several task force members made excellent suggestions for structuring and revising the handout, so that it would be most useful for department chairs and their faculty. Katz will incorporate them into a second draft. Dr. Rizzo recommended that we clarify that their will be many ways of soliciting input from faculty, besides the listening project; faculty will be able to participate in the faculty forum, email GERTF members directly, and post to web discussion pages.

3. Teams assignments—Team members should send Katz preferences for listen-project team assignments in the next few days, so that the list can be finalized within a week. Team members will not conduct interviews in their own departments; in this way, they can participate as faculty members when listening-project teams come to their departments. Dr. Moseley commented that departments should be first on our list to visit, followed by programs; task force members agreed.

4. Faculty Forum, Senate—A date has been scheduled for a Faculty Forum event devoted to General Education at UNCA. Each member of GERTF agreed to make a commitment to bring at least 2-3 colleagues to this event, which will be held at the Laurel Forum in Karpen Hall, on Friday, 7 September, 4:15-5:45 pm. There will be a guided discussion of General Education issues, touching on what works, what doesn’t, and what might improve what we have.

Katz reported that he had arranged to make a brief presentation before the Faculty Senate, in order to up-date them on what we accomplished by the end of last year, and what we intend to accomplish this year. It was recommended by several task force members that Katz also make a presentation at the meeting of department chairs and program directors. [Katz did do this, on Monday, 27 August, where he distributed materials about the listening projects, along with the Directive Recommendations for Curricular Development and Fiscal/Structural Change. This was a great idea—thanks goes to those who recommended it.]

5. Student forums— Maegan Spencer recommended that we begin thinking about how to involve students in the discussions about General Education reform. She suggested that she and Katz meet separately and report back to the task force. They will meet on Tuesday, 28 August. [This meeting has taken place. A report will be made to the task force at our next gathering.]

6. The website—The GERTF website has new links, one to a page describing different models of General Education and another to the General Education programs at other schools. More of such educational content will appear at intervals throughout the year. If anyone has additional material they would like to see on the site, please email Katz.

7. Agenda for Fall 2001—Our work for the semester will center on discussions of the APC reports on departments contributing to the General Education curriculum and to the listening projects. We will likely also begin discussions of recommendations regarding Diversity in the curriculum, the issues surrounding Absolutely Free Electives, and the number of credit hours in the program.

It was suggested that we try to obtain digitized copies of individual departmental or divisional reports to APC and put them in a Unity shared file for GERTF use. Katz will look into this.