Shared Futures
Hawai'i Pacific University
Background. Hawai'i Pacific University is an independent, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, liberal arts and career-oriented university founded in 1965. HPU has grown from a small college to a major teaching-learning university with more than 8,000 students from all over the world. The school has a long-standing tradition and reality of having an international student body. One-fourth of HPU’s students come from more than 100 countries worldwide annually. The internationality of our student community has created a naturally-occurring global environment on campus and in the classroom. The University Mission is:
"Hawai'i Pacific University is an international learning community set in the rich cultural context of Hawai'i. Students from around the world join us for an American education built on a liberal arts foundation. Our innovative undergraduate and graduate programs anticipate the changing needs of the community and prepare our graduates to live, work, and learn as active members of a global society."
Our goals for participation in the AAC&U project are:
1. Design a new “Global Citizenship Freshman Seminar” with global learning outcomes and adaptability to contexts offered by disciplines.
2. Support planned development of courses for our new general education program, which aligns the curriculum with HPU’s “Five Themes” learning outcomes: Global Systems, World Cultures, Values and Choices, Research and Epistemology, and Communication.
3. Develop appropriate learning assessments to match defined learning outcomes and the University’s goal of assisting students to develop individual definitions of global citizenship.
The “Before” of General Education. In the early nineties, HPU faculty defined the “Five Themes” to guide the general education curriculum, but the themes were never used to shape or assess general education learning. Program review demonstrated limitations in use of the themes and substantial faculty and student frustration with a rigid structure of courses and disciplines. The general education requirements were unique for each degree, although certain courses were required by most majors. A total of 51 semester credits or 17 three-credit courses were required, with at least 2 courses at the upper-division level. The lower-division courses that were “in common” across most majors were:
Writing – 2 courses
Math – 1 course
Economics – 2 courses
Political Science – 1 course
History – 2 courses
Natural Science – 1 course
Communication – 1 course
Other disciplines with more variation
The “Recent Past up to the Present” of General Education. The program review did not get as far as doing “respectable learning assessment.” There was sufficient concern about the lack of connection between existing courses and the Five Themes to cause formation of a major faculty-led Task Force to address the General Education Program. This task force developed learning outcomes and considered new curricular ways of using the Five Themes to shape general education. The task force proposed a curriculum structure that is based on learning outcomes and choices of courses under each theme. A major reward has been realization that “global citizenship” can frame the learning within these themes.
The new structure was passed by the Faculty Assembly in May 2005, demonstrating faculty agreement on directions charted by the Task Force (see Pdf file attached with application).
The “Present Poised to Implement the Future” of General Education. The current “transition” curriculum has many more substitutions for the previous rigid requirements. This means that student choice has been introduced as a transition improvement. It is hoped that this gives students more of a sense of connection with the courses they take and that it gives the faculty a chance to begin adjusting to changes in courses that will need to be scheduled.
The “future” curriculum has been organized under the Five Themes. Within the themes there are two or three sub-areas. Courses will be located into this structure upon review and approval by the new curriculum review committee for general education (a formal structure under the larger university curriculum committee). Faculty will submit applications for courses to be located under the various themes and sub-areas. Eligibility will be based on inclusion of sufficient learning outcomes for that theme plus one secondary theme. Many previously-required courses will be adapted to this new model, which means that they will include the specific learning outcomes that match with that theme.
Note: The document describing the model has not been attached here because it is long and probably too detailed to be of use. The following shows the five themes and sub-areas.
Common Core Theme Requirements (3 courses per theme)
Communication
A Writing and Critical Thinking (1 course at 1000 level first term at
HPU)
B Communication Contexts
C Open Category
Values and Choices
A Ethical Inquiry
B Social Choice
C Open Category
World Cultures
A Cultures, Themes and Movements
B Engaging with Difference
C Open Category
Global Systems
A Natural Systems
B Globalization
C Open Category
Research and Epistemology
A Writing, Research and Information Literacy
B Numeracy and Quantitative Reasoning
C Research and Epistemology in the Disciplines
No specific theme has, as yet, been “flagged” as indicating global learning. This is partly because we need to begin the work of reviewing courses before it is possible to do this with certainty. As we engage with the AAC&U project as well as the spirited dialogue we expect to flow from review of courses, we anticipate being able to be more specific with this task.
The freshman/first-year seminar being developed as part of this project will be grounded in a discipline and may fall under one theme or another, depending on the course focus. We are currently developing 8 different sections of this seminar. Participating faculty come from the disciplines of Writing, Psychology, Communication, History, Anthropology and Political Science. This curriculum work has begun and these faculty will make up HPU’s team for this project.
The present status of assessment is that this is an area where serious work is needed and we plan to focus on assessment as part of our work in this AAC&U project. Although course-level assessments relating to global participation are likely being assessed in various courses in the curriculum, we need to develop and conduct systematic university-wide assessments relating to global citizenship in upper and lower division levels of the general education program.
Issues and Challenges. The relevant political issues at play are discussed under the “Team” in the fourth section below. These relate to concerns about protection of disciplines, involvement of Faculty Assembly, and preferences for traditional vs. progressive approaches to the curriculum. Resource issues are an ongoing part of the conversation and include faculty workload, creating support for developing innovations such as linked courses and learning communities, and the costs of US mainland travel to attend professional meetings.
The Bigger Picture of What We Hope to Achieve. As part of our strategic planning, we have a bigger picture in mind for what we seek to accomplish in the next 2-3 years with our global citizenship goal. That picture shows: full implementation of the new general education program, use of learning assessments for improvement, and a strong program of co-curricular events on global citizenship that fosters student learning through social and intellectual interaction with people from around the world.
We have already established that “global learning” and “American education” are stated in the mission, a decision that created a lot of campus debate and dialogue. A minority have concerns that HPU is “too Western” in content and methods, but there is more general and widespread endorsement of general education as the liberal arts foundation for lifelong learning and citizenship with global learning as an integral element. We have also defined global learning outcomes appropriate to HPU’s mission, Recent faculty endorsement of the new general education program establishes global learning outcomes as central to the curriculum through use of the “Five Themes.”
With regard to the work ahead, the promise of benefits associated with participation in this network is partially found in the strengthening of the general education program that will come from network feedback as well as from increased faculty competence. This process is expected to gain significant momentum when we have learning assessment data as feedback for faculty.
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