1) What is your department’s vision of General Education? (set 5)

General Education allows students to get basic college level training as well as exposure to areas that make up the components of a University.  It offers students the opportunity to be exposed to the various components of the University at a higher level than they would have been exposed to at high school.  Their experiences should be diverse and varied.

 General Education should expose students to a higher level and to things they could not experience in high school.

 General Education should be diverse and academically well rounded.

 General Education should be distinguished clearly from a high school course.  Often this might not seem the case for entering freshmen.  We need to think about this issue when developing courses, topics for study, book selection, and so on.

 In General Education courses, we should strive for the age-old balance between breadth and depth. More depth is essential to distinguish General Education courses from those at the high-school level.

The range of perspectives among students enrolled in General Education classes should also reflect interdisciplinary differences.  That is, we benefit from students from a variety of majors being enrolled in General Education courses.

In General Education courses, professors should model life-long learning and a desire to expand intellectually.  The should demonstrate that even professors who specialize in a given field may have limits in their knowledge base, and that this inspires them to learn more.

We should undermine the idea of college as "job training".  General Education and the liberal arts should be about making a rounded, reflective life.

General Education is the foundation for what follows in a student’s career here; the Humanities program and Arts 310 are the mortar that binds it all together. 

General Education must help students to develop both knowledge and skills necessary for their success here.  Language 102 does this, as do other courses in the curriculum.

It should produce assessible results.  At a minimum, it should enable students to tolerate diversity.  Preferably, they will learn to embrace diversity.  They should be able to solve problems.  They should be able to view problems from the perspective of others.  There are so many ways that the goals of general education can be attained using both curricular and co-curricular experiences.

General education should assist students in developing intra- and inter-personal skills.  They should understand how their decisions impact other people.  They should be able to understand how their belief system affects their decisions.  They should be able to hear others and they should be able to express their opinions to others.  It is rare to find students who can actively listen…to communicate, problem solve while expressing unconditional positive regard.  Not only should they be able to find work that makes a meaningful contribution, but they shuld be able to live well-balanced lives.

They should be active citizens taking part in the community and should be able to recognize the reward in service to others.  They should be aware of global concerns.  They should feel confident in taking action.  They should have a sense of the value of the individual’s impact.  They should ask of themselves, “Where is my contribution?”

We strongly support the concept of having a general education program and the idea of having general goals for this portion of our curriculum.