General Education Mini-Conference: Breakout Question Notes
March 6, 2020
Breakout Question Notes
Considerations
- Student population
- Many international students do not understand the need or purpose of general education courses – U.S. is one of only 3 nations that offers general education courses
- Consider impact on transfer students
- 60% of jobs that Gen Z will have do not yet exist – we need to think larger than tailoring them for a job, we need to fuel ideas for the future
- Funding
- Tension between financing and pedagogy
- In terms of budget, we need to start the conversation by identifying what we want for our students and what they need in the world and in their lives. If we can come to a consensus on that, there will be compromises on budget, teaching, etc. along the way.
- Released time for faculty so they can teach general education courses
- Administration
- This cannot be a top-down approach, faculty need to think of this as a group, look at the outcomes, outside of the majors
- Determining which faculty will teach general education courses, who gets released from courses, etc.
- What type of administrative oversight will there be to keep programs honest and on track?
- Unintentional impacts
- Model what we think the real impact will be on the outside, map out how it might play out on our students and where they are coming from
- Identify what we can control and what might undermine/influence efforts
- Remain accountable
- Miscellaneous
- Course sizes
- Faculty resources and development opportunities
- Focus not just on what the courses offered are, but how they are taught
- General education is not just a bundle of introductory courses but a substantial source of practical and general knowledge that is imperative for the University to provide
- Create mile markers along the general education path so students know exactly where they are
- If we want students and faculty to buy into this, we need to package and market it like crazy – we need it to be a wholesale effort
Process
- Create a committee with a strong focus on consultation
- Committee membership nomination should be open so that faculty know it was not selective, however, position representation is important to consider
- Committee members should be a group of people who are willing to disagree
- Committee should regularly consult with stakeholders including:
- Faculty (faculty should be at the core)
- Assistant Deans, heads of advising, etc. (the people who really know well how to articulate considerations)
- Experts in curricular design, programming, and advising
- Budget authority
- Students – it is important to expand student consultation beyond the typical pool of Honors College students and/or those involved in student government if we want a full picture
- Comment from A. Perrin on topic of consultation: Bringing in many constituents who care about UIC students is the right thing to do, but doing what they say may not necessarily be the right thing to do. Listen to them, but be prepared to reject some of what they say.
- Thematic and Practical Approach
- All colleges should be at the table in order to impose equity and balance
- College representation should include: directors of undergraduate studies, faculty gen ed. instructors, academic advisors, undergraduate student government, UIC alumni, and major employers of UIC undergraduates
- Emphasize faculty capacity
- Make sure faculty have the skills and recent scholarship needed to effectively teach a general education course – equally as important, make sure the faculty are confident in their own abilities to do so (connection with the Center for Teaching Excellence)
Knowledge and skills
- Career Readiness
- Competencies in employability – critical thinking, communication, ethics, social justice, diversity, etc.
- Capacity to adapt to new situations
- What is the workforce looking for? People who can communicate, basic numeric skills, basic science skills, make good decisions, look at and understand data, work with a diverse group of people
- Understanding of Vulnerability
- What does it mean? How do we express it? How do we embrace and handle it?
- Confidence
- In themselves, their education and abilities, and the ability to effectively communicate their confidence
- Effective Collaboration
- Understanding how to effectively collaborate in the real world is necessary
- Effective collaboration takes guidance and practice
- We often find that students are uncomfortable with disagreements but it is important to learn how to respectively but effectively disagree during collaboration
- Effective Communication – Ability to Speak to Competencies
- Students will be competing with graduates from other schools, they must be able to articulate their competencies to stand out in the marketplace
- This is particularly important for UIC grads, many of whom do not have homegrown networks (i.e. parental educational backgrounds, large networks/connections)
- Understanding of Shared Frameworks & the Ability to Transfer Skills (Intellectual Flexibility)
- Many disciplines use similar approaches to solving problems
- Generally the same process of understanding the history of the problem, understanding the context, and supplementing that with new knowledge to generate new solutions
- Open our students’ eyes to this already existing across campus and help them understand how they can transfer a skill that they learned in an intro history class to an engineering class down the line
- Comments/Questions:
- What is it that we are ultimately trying to accomplish? What do we want for our students and how are we coming up with that answer? Is there evidence that those discussions are/can be based on?
- Response: Simple terms, general education maximizes intellectual flexibility and increases capacity to adapt to new situations
- Decided competencies should not lie within an individual college or department, however, they should be institution-specific by leveraging the competencies that our students already bring to the table (ex: global citizenship, languages, etc.)
- Whatever the final competencies become, they need to be clearly stated and clearly assessed so that students can speak to their achievement of them after graduation
- General sense of anxiety – many students operate with more anxiety than that is actually rational. Faculty feel anxiety over classes, course seats, etc.
- Generate a common understanding regarding the rights and responsibilities of the college (getting clarity and having discussions is important); movement has to be mindful of the current state of the relationship between center and periphery
- A linear model would be hard for UIC to implement – group most resonated with the UCF model as it is important for students to see how the classes are connected and how the general education program could serve them.
- Students would be able to clearly see which classes connect with which competencies
- Would there be a way for students to craft their general education path themselves?
- This would create more administrative work, but it would help students see how a general education benefits them and is not just a “requirement”
- Color coding model used by UCF is problematic but appeals to students and allows them to select the courses that most interest them (almost like a minor)