AAC&U News | June 2003

Temple University's Major Revision

Temple's College of Liberal Arts Defines Core Competencies and Revitalizes Undergraduate Majors

At Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a public institution that serves almost 30,000 students, the College of Liberal Arts recently took on an ambitious plan to revitalize its undergraduate liberal arts and sciences majors. This effort engaged faculty in reinventing gateway courses and sequencing these majors to ensure students had mastered a set of identified key skills. They revisited capstone courses and writing requirements so that all graduating students have an occasion to articulate an overarching theme to their undergraduate careers.

The effort started at the college six years ago with a faculty retreat to define core competencies that were essential to a liberal arts education. Representatives from all liberal arts departments and programs gathered to identify college-wide and discipline-specific competencies. From that exercise, they settled on five core competencies and resolved to continue discussions about how to systematically build them into the curriculum.

Temple University's plan exemplifies several of the recommended “action steps” for improving undergraduate learning included in AAC&U's recent report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College .The report urges faculty members and deans to set explicit learning goals shared by general education and major courses, to implement “cumulative and sequential” curricula to build student knowledge and intellectual capacities, and to assume collective responsibility across disciplines for an integrated curriculum.

Temple's effort to reform and revitalize its undergraduate liberal arts majors happened in two phases. First, they examined how basic competencies are taught in core courses. They then turned their attention to how individual majors build coherence for students, clarify expectations for learning outcomes, and sequence courses to culminate in an enhanced senior project. The departments were given the task of exploring and developing ways to assess student mastery of material across majors or in strategically selected courses. The college developed portfolios to enable students to connect their learning and to gauge competencies.

Reforming the Curriculum from the End to Beginning

When different departments tackled their majors, many started at the top by scrutinizing capstone experiences. These senior courses had intense writing components intended to capitalize on the whole college learning resume—ensuring that the capstone experience was truly integrative and cumulative. For example, the history department worked on fine-tuning its capstone projects to make sure students examined in a systematic way the skills they acquired, articulated their professional goals, and chose a project—developing a Web site, teaching a class, or designing a historic walking tour—that allowed for the practical application of their learning.

Thinking about culminating learning experiences often led faculty to reinvent earlier courses in the major because it illuminated what needed to be changed in the major's foundation. For example, if faculty members weren't entirely satisfied with students' research skills needed for capstone projects, they knew they had to emphasize these skills much earlier. This doing so led to the development of new gateway courses that would better prepare students for their intermediate courses. Often, this exercise presented an opportunity to redesign intermediate courses to more effectively link them to both the introductory and capstone courses. In the end, no matter where they started retooling faculty were able to refine the sequence of learning, and this work had the effect of knitting the disciplines more tightly together.

The Faculty Fellows System

As part of this reform initiative, Temple's College of Liberal Arts called for proposals from departments either beginning systematic reforms or extending or implementing pilot projects already underway. Each effort was led by a teaching fellow, thirty-five of whom have contributed to the program since its inception. “It is important, from time to time, that we step back and take stock of the many steps involved in our collective curricular innovation effort,” said Sherri Grasmuck, former associate dean of faculty development for the College of Liberal Arts and professor of sociology, in the call she issued last year. The system is designed to showcase “best practices” and to draw together the many different reform efforts in the college in previous years.

For the teaching fellows system, up to eight faculty per semester received a one-course reduction and were expected to lead a sub-committee or “teaching circle.” These groups met and worked either to develop a proposal for revising their major or to implement the reforms previously developed and endorsed by the department. The faculty fellows “challeng[e] us to set aside long-held notions of what our majors should look like and what skills our students should acquire by graduation,” according to the report on curricular reform issued by the college.

Two elements were key to the success of this approach. First, new proposals needed to be aligned with what had already been done and teaching fellows needed the full support of their home departments. The fellows system was also a way for the departments to get new ideas from each other and share successful, ongoing reforms. Social science faculty members were able to mentor humanities faculty in the practice of conducting focus groups, for example.

“[E]ach teaching circle was made up of tenured and tenure track faculty members. Several groups were based in departments while two others took a more sweeping view of writing in the social sciences and in the humanities,” according to Jayne Drake, vice dean for undergraduate affairs for the College of Liberal Arts. The circles also often included the university writing director and a dean of informational and instructional technology.

Faculty worked on exploring the writing experience in the majors over time and on guidelines for what kind of writing benchmarks students should reach at progressive points throughout each major. For example, five social science departments worked together to produce a handbook of guidelines for writing across social science disciplines and to integrate these goals throughout each social sciences major. According to Professor Michael Kaufman, chair of the “Writing in the Humanities” Teaching Circle, each of the handbook assignments:

not only invites students to develop particular skills—close reading, research, argumentation—but also invites students to develop a sense of critical awareness about how they are using these skills…This sense of reflection may best be instilled by teaching writing and reading skills recursively…We saw a great potential in having students revisit skills as they proceed through the major. A recursive model [allows] students to develop skills with a deepened sense of mastery and sophistication and [asks] them explicitly to reflect on their intellectual progress.

How Two Disciplines Tackled Major Revision

Each department tailored its reforms to fit the specific needs of the discipline, while trying to make its work more relevant to the comprehensive, multidisciplinary curriculum. The English department reviewed a new major requirement and track system. A teaching fellow met with a focus group of seniors to evaluate the system. These efforts led to a decision to develop a new gateway course. Since it was difficult to come up with a single gateway course, they piloted an experimental beginning course with honors students. Guest faculty contributed to represent differing visions of an ideal foundational course. Students read a set of representative texts in their entirety (instead of anthologies) in a series of different genres such as lyric poetry, modern fiction, and nonliterary prose. Students were asked to consider a variety of approaches to these texts and wrote three critical papers that traced a sequence through all of the genres they read. This successful experience resulted in a proposal for a new similar gateway course for all majors to introduce them to the important terms, concepts, and methods presumed by subsequent courses in the major. Writing assignments were planned to proceed in a progressive fashion from experimental and descriptive assignments to ones that were more analytical and reflective.

The environmental studies program surveyed other programs throughout the country and discovered that other institutions had tackled the “depth versus breadth” issue by developing tracks and encouraging double majors. They developed model curricula for students pursuing environmental studies in conjunction with other science majors and model tracks within the environmental studies major such as environmental advocacy/law. After conducting focus groups with students, they tailored their program to address student concerns leading to earlier, more strategic help in career counseling, graduate school applications, and internship placements. They integrated these concerns into the senior capstone project which includes elements of group student research work and graduate school planning and resume preparation to ease the transition to life after graduation.

“It is gratifying,” says Drake, “to see the long strides in curriculum reform for the College of Liberal Arts and even better to see faculty from every corner of the college actively engaged in the process.” However, challenges do exist. “Faculty, at first, did not see the need for or value of opening their classroom doors, discussing their teaching methods, or sharing their syllabi with their colleagues or the dean's office,” says Drake. She credits Grasmuck with recognizing the “personal capital” invested in these curricular revisions and with establishing an “atmosphere of trust and a sense of a larger purpose,” while she continued to serve as a motivator and advocate for faculty in their efforts. For the past two years, the College of Liberal Arts has hosted day-long curriculum conferences in which Teaching Circles showcase the accomplishments of the program, and this past year featured handbooks of accumulated knowledge: “Writing in the Social Sciences” and “Writing in the Humanities.” For the future, Drake says, “[W]e hope to continue our discussions and incorporate what has been done to date into larger discussions and curricular reforms.”

For a report on curricular reform in Temple's College of Liberal Arts, visit www.temple.edu/CLA/TeachingFellows/cur_rpt.html.