Present: Faculty—Dohse, Friedenberg, Hardy, Konz, Krumpe, Lee, McKnight, Moseley, Ruiz, White-Carter, Katz; Student—Spencer; Alumni--Perry

1. GERTF Report to the Senate—On 24 January, Dr. Katz will make a brief report to the Senate about the accomplishments and agenda of the GERTF, as stipulated in the GERTF charge.

2. Discussion of General Education program components and APC Reports: Health and Fitness (with original report submitted to APC)—We discussed the Health and Fitness requirement (with original Health and Fitness report submitted to APC). Dr. Keith Ray attended the meeting to answer questions we had about the current HF requirement and about any alternatives that the HF faculty were considering.

Dr. Ray presented a brief overview of the current requirement and its history. He noted that the division of the requirement into concept-based courses and practice-based, fitness courses. In addition there are HF 153, 154, and 155, which carry 3 credit-hours and can be used to satisfy the General Education requirement. This system, Dr. Ray noted, is cumbersome and often confusing, for faculty, students and advisors.

Dr. Ray said that the Health and Fitness Department is interested in an alternative to the present requirement, in which students would have a choice of three 3-credit courses: Health and Wellness, Women’s Health, and Men’s Health. Each of these courses would have a concepts component and a practice/fitness component. With practice and theory in the same course, students would have a more intensive, coherent experience. Students would be strongly encouraged to take this course in their Freshman year. Dr. Ray also noted that this alternative would allow for the sorts of outcome assessment that is currently not possible. GERTF members generally agreed that conceptually and pedagogically this was a better design than the present requirement.

We discussed in some detail the implications this alternative would have for resource allocation, especially in terms of faculty needed to go to a 3-credit requirement. Dr. Ray noted that about two-thirds of the students are taking the 3-credit option, primarily because the Department is moving in this direction in terms of course availability. Also, many students are transferring in with HF credit and would not represent an additional population in need of courses. Therefore, the change to a 3-credit requirement would not be from a 2-credit course across the board; the department is well on its way to this change already and it would not represent a very large additional allocation of resources. Dr. Ray also observed that, in a worst-case scenario, coaches could be trained to teach the 3-credit hour course, as long as they possessed the credentials demanded by SACS; the best-case scenario would be for the HF Department to hire at least one additional fulltime faculty member, which Dr. Ray believed would be adequate to handle the extra sections of the 3-credit course.

Dr. Ray was asked if he would be able to offer GERTF a sense of what sorts of resources would be necessary if this alternative were adopted in the revised General Education curriculum. He said that he would put together an analysis of both the best-case and worst-case scenarios; he said that he would pay particular attention to how many FTE faculty would be required in each scenario.

3. VCAA Search update—Dr. Nelms forwarded the following information to Katz. The Search Committee has received about 190 applications, a good pool, with about 30 standouts. The plan is to narrow the pool first to 30, and then to 12 for the first wave of interviews and site visits. Then, the Committee will narrow to the field to 4 candidates to bring to our campus. Dr. Nelms observed that General Education is well represented by Search Committee members. GERTF will need to attend sessions with the candidates. Katz will talk to Committee chair Dr. Tracy Brown, to insure that the task force has an identified block of time in the schedule of each candidate.

4. Listening projects—We are nearing the completion of the Listening Project. Continue sending in your reports, as Word attachments. We will post these reports on the website, all anonymously, so that departments and individuals cannot be identified. We discussed the format for posting the LP reports and agreed that it would be best to post all responses to question #1 first, then all responses to #2, etc. This will help focus faculty attention and create the least confusion.

5. Website additions—We discussed the new page of links on Diversity and Curricular design. These materials will serve as an educational resource for GERTF members, especially the design team; faculty, staff, and students will also benefit from these resources. Katz is working on putting together other pages of links on the following topics: core programs across the country, service learning, learning communities, science education in general education curricula, arts and general education, problem-based learning, community-based learning, assessment, and resource allocation. Please contact Katz if there is a topic you’d like to see presented on the website.

6. Our next meetings will be next week, 30 January and 6 Feb, 4:30 pm, in the Red Oak Room. We will be discussing the Math requirement at the next meeting. Also, remember to keep the Wednesday, 4:30-5:30 timeslot clear throughout this semester and next year.