1) What is your department’s vision of General Education? (set 4)

General Education should include: essential skills, intellectual breadth, general knowledge, and exposure to new topics.   It should serve as the unifying force to this university and its liberal arts mission.  General Education should be flexible,  represent university values, and the parts should work together.

General Education should not be focused on the teaching of methodologies used in specific disciplines.    

General Education is "people-making" in which we are guided by our vision of what our graduates ought to look like.  It involves legitimate, sometimes controversial goals.

 It is where our students learn everything we don=t teach them in the major that we think they should know.

 Everyone, students and faculty alike, will hate it because it is coercive, because it is composed of core courses which everyone must take, because faculty are outside of their areas of expertise and students are outside of their disciplinary interests.

 Courses in General Education, including [those in our department], provide different perspectives than disciplinary courses.

At UNCA, Humanities is the core of General Education.  Other courses, both in General Education and not, should be oriented toward the Humanities courses, either utilizing material in these courses are foreshadowing issues to be considered in the future.  This vision isn=t fulfilled now because of faulty execution of the program and lack of faculty support.

An FYE kind of course with a thematic approach (ie, “Intro to Liberal Arts” with a  focus on Ecofeminism) and  LR component; some kind of creativity is ideal

“Reference, Research, and Report-Writing”-like course, as other institutions have, to be tailored to individual majors (would answer the question, “What does it mean to conduct library research as a Sociology major?”)

Team-teaching – “liaisons” are now in place (Janet for Lit/Lang, etc) – expanding this idea and cultivating better relationships among library staff, faculty, and students – would be good for students within particular disciplines to know who their department’s library liaison is – this has been going on unofficially, but librarians could “institutionalize” it, or formalize it, and meet with students during set class periods each semester

 More emphasis must be placed, in the context of gen ed, on “information literacy” – finding info, knowing about valuable and credible sources, etc

 “Collaborative relationships” are ideal – let’s listen to ourselves and past experiences in shaping future trends

 “Integration” – Merritt mentioned integrating much hands-on library research in his HUM 124 class next semester; many library staff noted that this is a real possibility for a model and are interested in working with faculty in this capacity

General Education should help in the transition from High School to College and from College to the Work place.  The approach to Gen Ed should be by outcome basis, not a laundry list to check off.  General Education should have emphasis on the interdisciplinary, on patterns and connections between disciplines.