1) What is your department’s vision of General Education? (set 1)

General Education should be interdisciplinary with an emphasis on problem-solving and integrated learning. 

We support the Humanities program and contribute to it each semester.

Exposure to a lab experience is important for all students. 

In summary, general education is important, interdisciplinary, and practical. 

General Education should “educate” people in a broad sense, rather than “train” them in a business sense.  General education must ensure breadth of knowledge.  The college career is viewed as a life-changing experience: over the course of four years, students develop in many ways and acquire “life skills.”  Some faculty noted that there is also an experiential component to General Education.

Left on their own, students may not choose to study a broad range of areas. It is therefore all the more important that the General Education program provide breadth.

One goal of General Education should be to provide a foundation for life-long learning, so students can continue to expand their areas of knowledge – this makes for a more interesting person.

By providing an historical context and an appreciation for varied areas such as art, literature, foreign language, and natural sciences, General Education equips students to better understand their world.

The goals of General Education, and of specific components of the General Education program, should be well articulated.  We should be able to answer students when they ask, “Why do we have to learn this?”

Through General Education, students should develop skills in critical thinking, and in written and oral communication.  

The "menu" approach is widely praised for giving students more choice than the existing required humanities sequence.

Ideally, any required core courses in gen-ed should take up only a small portion of the students' load. Students should then be able to make connections themselves between their courses AND still have room in their schedules for free electives, taken pass/fail (to encourage exploration without hurting the GPA).

Gen-ed should not be motivated by a zeal for insuring students get a common experience, nor for insuring that a certain content is covered, as
though this will be their “last chance” to learn anything in a given area. Instead, the goal must be to help students learn to learn, whatever the subject, throughout their lives.

Depth is preferable to breadth.

Gen-ed requirements should not be motivated by the "latest fad," like multiculturalism, or concerns about the political acceptability or popularity of historical figures or theories.

Gen-ed should have a consistent, agreed-upon guiding philosophy or mission.

Historically, gen-ed courses have been staffed by full-time members of a department's faculty rather than adjuncts because the pool of available adjuncts in the community mostly consists of professionals rather than academics. Gen-ed courses need to be taught by full-time faculty.

General education is not a big unified thing, but a collection of courses.  The math general education course do have a common thread:  usefulness.  There should be a unifying philosophy with math at the center.  The talk about creating good citizens is good, but general education needs to be empowering for the individual.

Faculty believe that some components of General Education need to come early in the program (for example, writing and library research), but that the best model integrates General Education alongside major courses throughout the four years.  Students need multiple contexts for developing skills and time to absorb the knowledge they are acquiring.  Further, as they mature, students are better able to appreciate some of the areas explored in General Education.

For major programs that approach sixty hours, there is an advantage to a General Education program that spans the four years: this allows for spacing out of the major courses as well.

The current number of hours in general education requirements, combined with majors as currently constituted, deters students from double majors or minors. 

We ought to avoid a cafeteria approach, with students selecting options from a distribution of courses.  An approach like this results in logrolling and backscratching among competing departments and contradicts the idea of General Education as those ideas and skills that all students experience.  This approach is present in our current Social Science component.

We don't have any history courses in General Education, and perhaps ought to.  History belongs somewhere.

I like the core program model that is used in Humanities and Arts and would suggest that it be extended to the interdisciplinary science course--"Science and Society" or something like that--and perhaps to other areas.

The core courses ought to be taken by all UNCA students, even though the articulation agreement does not allow this outcome.

There is great value in interdisciplinarity.