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

1. Discussion of APC Report on Natural Sciences requirement (with original report submitted to APC)—Drs. Alex Huang of Atmospheric Sciences, Rick Maas of Environmental Studies, and Randy Booker of Physics were present to help GERTF members with questions about the Natural Science requirement and to comment on curricular directions their departments might be interested in pursuing. Conversation started with resource issues that might be impeding or might in the future impede the contribution of Natural Science departments to the General Education curriculum. This issue was one of the key concerns of the APC report. Dr. Huang said that space had been a concern but that the new science building will likely take care of that. For ATMS, the key issue is getting a 4^th faculty member, so that the department can continue serving its majors, other science majors needing ATMS courses, while maintaining or increasing the departmental contribution to General Education. With a 4^th faculty member, the department would not have to rely on adjuncts so heavily. Without this addition, raising the level of contribution to General Education will not be feasible without heavier reliance on adjunct hires. Randy Booker said that Physics began working up their Gen Ed Physics courses in 1991, without additional resources. Additional lab equipment would be a great help, but the department has been providing for their General Education courses without having a budget for it. Regarding space concerns, they are beginning to see a need for another lab for Astronomy. Richard Mass noted that their main resource problem, but not a major one in his view, is that they don’t have the number of faculty required to satisfy the demand for ENVR 130, without raising the class size significantly. For example, ENVR offers 5 fall sections of ENVR 130, and 4 in the spring; Enrollment Services would like to see 6 in the fall and 5 in the spring. There are not enough faculty to teach these courses and meet other departmental needs.

It was observed that departments do not get new positions for the purposes of General Education. In the sciences this is made even more difficult because faculty need to have 6 student contact hours to do the lab courses properly but only get credit for 4 SCH in our current formula. Adding larger General Education burdens will eventually become an equity and morale issue. Also, disciplinary approaches to the General Education curriculum (the Natural and Social Science distribution, that is) are not high on our list of General Education or Academic Program priorities.

Dr. Ruiz noted that there have been cases of innovation in science Gen Ed courses that are revenue neutral at the outset, but then receive some institutional support in the future, after the new programs or offerings are up and running. The Physics courses are an example: they started with a desire to do something new and exciting, and then the faculty in the department made certain sacrifices to help others get the time and resources they needed to create and teach the courses; finally, grants were written to fund the new programs in their early stages. This might be possible for other departments, but if all departments tried this at the same time, then the administration might not have the funds necessary to support them all at some future date.

The discussion turned to the issue of breadth and depth in science instruction. Dr. McKnight asked whether breadth and depth were both necessary for General Education purposes. Drs. Huang, Booker, and Maas all agreed that both were necessary and desirable. It was asked if one course might be enough, or if 8 credits were necessary, even if split between two courses. For example, might it not be possible to do a 3-hour interdisciplinary course and a 3-hour lab course. It might be possible, Dr Booker said, but Physics uses the 5 hours fully in its lab course. There would not be enough student-contact time without seriously diminishing the students’ experience, at least in the Physics course. Dr Krumpe observed that the 50-minute hour we have now is arbitrary. What if all 3-credit hour courses were 75 minutes long? Then the sciences would have the same amount of time for student-professor contact and professors would get credit for "3 hours" for teaching 3 hours. Dr. Ruiz noted that some sciences are already doing something like this. Several faculty noted that this would mean revising the grid, reworking the allocation of faculty resources and revising a lot of courses, many of which are not a part of the General Education curriculum. It was then asked if it might be possible to create 3-hour lab courses specifically for the 3-hour interdisciplinary courses. The chairs agreed that it might be done, but that there would be a significant loss: students would no longer receive the broad introduction to the principles, paradigms, theories, and issues in the discipline. They would get depth but not breadth, thus weakening the General Education experience students would have in the sciences.

Dr. Nelms asked how different student experience might be from one lab to the next. The chairs agreed that, while there was variation in the lab experiences across the different science disciplines, there was to a great extent many similarities.

It was then asked, what sort of interdisciplinarity are we searching for when we think about the Natural Sciences. Sometimes interdisciplinarity means crossing from one science discipline to another and sometimes it means incorporating the Social Sciences, and the Arts. Dr. Maas said that he thought that the General Education curriculum as a whole was very interdisciplinary and well-rounded, adding that "if it isn’t broke, then don’t fix it." Particularly, he said, he was afraid of losing breadth, if we abandon the 2-course requirement in the Natural Science.

Dr. Krumpe asked if perhaps all students should be required to take regular disciplinary lab introductions for the Science component. Other highly regarded liberal arts schools do this: why don’t we? Dr. Booker said that he thought that non-science students would shy away from math-based courses. Students would not excel in these types of courses unless they had the preparation that science majors tend to have when they enter the University. Students would cluster in the non-math-based Science courses, thereby weakening the ability of other departments to contribute to General Education. By contrast, General Education courses are specifically aimed at a different, broader population.

Our discussion went past the full hour. The task force thanked Drs. Booker, Huang, and Maas for their assistance and insights.

2. Listening projects –Please forward your listening projects to Katz as Word attachments as you receive them from the department chairs. All of the sessions have been conducted and nearly all the reports are in.

3. The next phase—If you have not yet sent Katz your preference for serving on the design, research, or listening-project analysis teams, please do so. At a future meeting, after the APC reports have been wrapped up, we will discuss in detail our next steps, which will include designing the curriculum, creating faculty forums around the new design elements, reaching out to students, and researching the structural and fiscal conditions necessary for curricular revision and implementation.

4. Asheville Institute on General Education—Katz reported that there are no funds to send a team, even at the reduced rate for which we might qualify as the home institution.

5. Our next meetings will be 6 March, 3 April, 10 April, at 4:30 pm, in the Red Oak Room. Also, remember to keep the Wednesday, 4:30-5:30 timeslot clear throughout this semester and next year.  The focus of these next meetings will be:

a. 6 March, Biology and Chemistry
b. 3 April, Arts and Ideas
c. 10 April, Strategies for the next phase of the revision