Present--Hardy, Konz, Krumpe, McKnight, Nelms, Ruiz, Spencer, White-Carter, Katz

1. Communication with campus constituencies—The Team talked about the importance of communication with all campus constituencies, emphasizing particularly that the design is in its earliest phase and that no specific design decisions have been made. Stress to all interested individuals that before moving forward at any step, the Task Force as a whole will convene to discuss the work of the Design Team in order to offer feedback and input, after which GERTF will bring its work to the faculty and staff (through  forums and through the website), for further consultation and input.  Also, emphasize the following elements of the process:  The Design Team is currently working on a draft statement of Principles for the Revision of General Education at UNCA.  The Principles are being shaped around issues that faculty and staff articulated during the SACS process, the Listening Project, and the GERTF review (mandate by our Senate charge) of the APC Report on General Education.  In addition we are nearly finished with the analysis of the Listening Project and will have this on our website shortly, for your information and commentary.   

Following the resolution of Principles for the future design, GERTF will write a draft version of the criteria that will establish what constitutes a general education course.  After this step, GERF will begin shaping the architecture of the new design, which will in turn be followed by the writing of the charges.  GERTF is also beginning to do preliminary work on resource development for funding the revised curriculum.  Again, at each step of the way, the Design Team will take drafts first to the Task Force as a whole and then to the campus community.  In addition, GERTF will make regular progress reports to APC and twice-yearly reports to the full Senate, as mandated by the Senate Resolution. 

2. Language for design documents—We discussed the importance of language for the work that we are doing, so that we might clearly communicate our process. The documents we are working on will be titled: "Principles for the Design," and "Parameters and Preferences."

3. Discussion of Principles for the Design—The Team discussed several of the Principles on the first draft. After much discussion, we resolved on three Principles. A draft of these three Principles will be forthcoming as an attachment. We will continue our discussions at next week’s meeting.

Several new issues arose in our conversation. They include: How will articulation affect our design? What is our philosophy on transfer students? Can we, for example, honor the articulation agreement but insist that students also have certain experiences before they are admitted to UNCA (e.g., we will give them credit, if they have the proper Associates degree, for all 100- and 200-level general education courses, but still require that they have an experience with the "Ancient World," the "Medieval and Renaissance World," "Academic Writing and Critical Thinking," etc., so that when they arrive here they have had experiences approximating our early general education program)? What are or ought to be our goals for the percentage distribution of full four-year students, students transferring in, students transferring out? Can we begin setting goals for achieving this preferred distribution? Can we begin reducing our dependence on students transferring in? What percentage of students transferring in actually have the full Associates degree required by the Articulation Agreement? Some of these issues need to be researched by the Resource Team and others need to be addressed by the VCAA.

Other issues included: If we wish to have fulltime faculty teaching in general education, what will be the status of adjuncts for replacing faculty in the majors? What will be necessary—in the way of recruitment, hiring, reward structure and faculty development—in order to integrate faculty into what is essentially a new culture regarding the relationship between general education and the major?

4. Other matters—The analysis of the listening project should be done shortly. Both Jeff Konz and Rebecca Bruce have done the work of analyzing the Project to isolate the key themes that emerge out of each response set. They will meet to review their independent results critically and to produce a single analysis. Then we will have the analysis completed, and will be able to distribute it to the faculty both on the website and in the first faculty forum. Thanks to Jeff and Rebecca.