General Education Review Committee
Minutes of September 26, 1997 Meeting
Curtis Wood reported on his visit to the General Education Committee's meeting on September 19th. A couple of useful points were raised at this meeting to allow us to anticipate questions at the Forum. Fred Hinson mentioned that technology is not specifically mentioned in the Principles. Some historical issues about the current General Education program were raised as well.
LeVon Wilson has had several student leaders contacted and invited to the Forum; he will continue to work on this, and committee members are encouraged to invite students from their classes and departments to participate in the Forum. Student interest will be stronger when there are more specifics about the "new" General Education program. Names of any students who are willing to attend should be sent to Linda Hambrick to add to the name-tags list. Part time faculty should also be invited. We can also have focus group meetings with student and part time faculty groups later if they do not have sufficient input this time.
With regard to the Forum, responses are coming in, Linda has arranged for refreshments, and arrangements have been made to record the open discussions. We will need to recruit recorders for the individual groups; please let Linda Hambrick know who you have selected so they can be placed in your discussion group. Our discussion group note-takers will have to compile and return the notes to us as soon as possible. The number of groups will be dictated by the number of us who are there to facilitate, so please let Curtis know if you have a conflict. Seating arrangements were discussed and we decided on a U-shaped audience with a section at the top of the "U" for the committee during the final discussion. Muriel Weedman in the Faculty Center will do name-tags coded for discussion groups.
We had a brief discussion (again) about how open to allow the discussions to be. Again, we want to avoid eliminating any possible input, but need to gently herd the discussions along the lines of the three questions we have posed. We need to know what the faculty feel are the important issues; what are problems with the current program? We cannot deal, at this time, with pleas for particular courses. We need to get at why specific wants are important, to get at the "whys" behind implementation issues. We could ask for course-specific ideas to be submitted in writing, so we can keep track of them for later reference. We can use these ideas to recruit continuing participation in our discussions. We can possibly consider discussion of what the "menu" of courses might look like, but not (at this time) about what specific courses are on the "menu".
It is worth thinking about how our current process differs from that of thirteen years ago that produced our current Gen. Ed. program. Curtis will meet with Bill Kane, who was on the committee of thirteen years ago, to try to gain some insight into the process then, compared to the process now. The campus climate is certainly different, but will still profoundly affect our process.
We briefly considered what will happen after the Forum. We need to see what kind of information we get from the forum before we know what our next steps will be. John Habel offered the help of the Qualitative Research Group to help us analyze the "data" we obtain from the forum, in the form of notes and reports from the group discussions. We want on-going participation of the campus community and some consensus. We will ask for volunteers for as-yet unspecified participation. We should remind the community of our idea of a time frame for the process.
It is not the purpose of the Forum to defend the Fundamental Principles. In general, the less we talk, the better. We are not necessarily ready to answer all of the questions that will be raised at this time, and this must be made clear to the audience. We are interested in sharing what we have learned and what we value as useful to our mission.
We will meet Friday, October 3, at 8:00 am in Stillwell 102, just to convince ourselves that there is life after the forum, and to consider what to do next.
Respectfully submitted,
Nory Prochaska, recording secretary