General Education Review Task Force
Meeting, 28 February 2001
Red Oak Room, 4:30-5:30 pm
Minutes
Present: Faculty--Bruce, , Friedenberg, Hardy, Konz, Krumpe, Lee, Moseley, Pons, White-Carter, Katz;
Students--Clere, Wilde-Ramsing; Alumni--Proctor. [Members on off-campus scholarly assignment/leave: Mike Ruiz, Tracey Rizzo]
1. Chairs and Program Directors meeting on Diversity--Dr. Katz reported on his attendance at the Chairs and Program Directors meeting, where the topic of Diversity was extensively discussed. Drs. Marcia Ghidina (Sociology), Bill Spellman (Humanities, History) and Randy Booker (Physics) each discussed what their departments and programs were doing to encourage curricular diversification. Following their presentations, discussion was opened up to all chairs and directors, who considered diversity in a broad range of contexts: curriculum, student recruitment and retention, faculty recruitment and retention, co-curricular activities, faculty development, and so on. It was an interesting conversation, one that indicated a general acknowledgement that the institution needs to continue its efforts on this issue in concrete ways and on a continuing basis.
2. Website--The website is nearly complete. Links to all minutes have been added. Other additions include a link to the Sense of the Senate Resolution authorizing our committee to do the revision and a page featuring the proposed Mission Statement and goals, with a link to a web discussion forum.
We discussed the importance of soliciting interest in the web forum. GERTF members should encourage colleagues to offer their ideas and views on the discussion forum. Katz is attending the next Chairs and Program Directors meeting, on 12 March, to discuss General Education and the progress of the task force: he will introduce Chairs and Program Directors to the website, which will be ready by then. Also, we will announce the website via faculty and staff email, at which time we will also encourage staff and faculty to read the proposed mission statement and goals, and to respond via the web forum.
3. SACS report and directive recommendations--We took a final look at the recommendations for curriculum revision and institutional change/fiscal allocation. Dr. Lee observed that the title of the Curricular Revision document might mislead people to think that we have already come up with specific revision items, as opposed to creating directive recommendations for the process of the revision. We changed the title of the document to "Directive Recommendations for the Process of Revising the General Education Program at UNCA." We will also change the title of the institutional change/fiscal allocation document, in order to emphasize the revision process.
We spent some time discussing the eventual sequencing of the directive recommendations. Dr. Friedenberg noted that some of the directive recommendations are free-standing issues and others are connected to one another through a set of conditional relations; this means that we will have to prioritize this latter set of recommendations so that we can proceed more effectively.
We discussed the directive recommendations for institutional change and fiscal allocation. Dr. Katz noted that in addition to a recommendation for creating an institutional structure for the development, maintenance, and oversight of General Education, we also need to examine the development of policy for appointing future Task Forces, so that future revisions are conducted more effectively. Dr. Friedenberg observed that it would be more appropriate for us to draft a policy and submit it to Senate as a recommendation for them to consider. The wording of this directive recommendation is as follows: GERTF should explore the development of a policy for creating and authorizing future General Education Review Task Forces; it should also consider policy regarding task force membership, frequency of meetings, the addition of new members, the rotation of members off the task force, and the method for reporting its work to campus constituencies. A recommendation regarding such policy should be submitted to the Faculty Senate for their consideration.
We discussed the importance also of establishing a policy regarding the attendance of meetings for this task force. Several members observed that regular attendance is critical, especially as we move into the information-gathering phase, which will require teams to go into programs and departments, and then to report back to the task force as a whole. We will discuss this issue further at a future meeting.
4. Going into programs and departments--We discussed methods for soliciting departments and programs for information that might guide us in our revision process. It was observed by several members that going into departments would be far better than either asking for written comments or requesting departments to attend our meetings. Going into departments and programs would allow us to acquire information in a manner that would be more likely to put faculty at ease. We will use a listening-project approach in which visitors to departments and programs record what faculty have to say, but try not to lead participants or shape their responses.
This effort will be very labor intensive, requiring us to visit as many as 34 or 35 departments, programs, and offices. We decided that we should gather information in teams of two or three. The teams should represent more than one division. We discussed putting together a set of questions to submit to chairs, program directors, and their faculty in advance of our meeting with them. Although she was unable to attend our meeting, Dr. Nelms sent us an email with a number of possible questions we might use in gathering information. We discussed these questions and reduced them to five: 1) What is your department's vision of General Education? 2) What works in our current General Education program? 3) What does not work in our current General Education program? 4) What changes in the General Education program would allow it to better serve your department, our students, and the University as a whole? 5) What do you think are the barriers to making those changes?
It was suggested that offering any more than these five questions might reduce the effectiveness of our information gathering. It was recommended that we all divide into teams for the purpose of conducting these meetings, but that Dr. Katz go on the first three or so teams, as a sort of test run, in order to troubleshoot the process. Katz will begin putting together a schedule of meetings.
5. Meeting times for future semesters--We briefly discussed the possibility of arranging an earlier time for our meetings. Katz said that he had tried this originally, but that scheduling an earlier slot that would work for so many people proved too difficult. For the time being, he said, we should keep our schedules for Fall 2001 and Spring 2002 clear on Wednesday's from 4:30-5:30pm.