A public university in Portland, Maine, USM is in the midst of comprehensive general education reform.

The University of Southern Maine Reenvisions General Education

Comprehensive general education reform is a long-term process that requires careful planning and consensus building. At the University of Southern Maine (USM), faculty and administrators embarked upon such reform in 2001 at the prompting of the school’s provost, Joseph Wood. Six years later, with new first-year courses being piloted and with a provisional general education plan in place, USM is poised to begin seeing the benefits of broad curricular reform.

The story of USM’s work on the curriculum illustrates the challenges and rewards of re-envisioning general education. As on many campuses, the existing general education curriculum at USM consists of disconnected, primarily introductory-level distribution requirements. In seeking to build a more integrated general education program, those leading the reform effort at USM have had to reconsider every element of the curriculum in light of newly articulated goals for student learning and achievement.

A New Framework for General Education

The general education reform process at USM began with an analysis of the old curriculum. Data from that analysis revealed that “nearly all students and many faculty members had no idea why they were taking or teaching a core course,” says Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education Judy Tizón, who has facilitated the general education planning process.

Given this lack of clarity, discussions about revising the curriculum moved quickly to “very fundamental questions about vision” and then to questions “about goals and learning outcomes,” says Assistant Provost for Undergraduate Education Susan McWilliams, another key figure in general education planning at USM. The results of this work were formalized in 2004, when the faculty senate adopted a statement of vision that identified five broad learning goals for students:

1. Informed understandings of human cultures and the natural world
2. Analytical, contextual, and holistic thinking about complex issues
3. Effective communication using multiple literacies and forms of expression
4. Critical reflection upon, and informed action in, their roles as citizens, family members, consumers, and producers
5. Ethical action to maintain their own health and contribute to the social, environmental, and economic welfare of local and global communities.

The statement goes on to specify multiple learning outcomes—both skills and content knowledge—under each of these goals. For example, the first goal includes expectations that students will be able to analyze interrelationships among ecosystems and human communities, understand the value of human diversity and freedom, and describe different disciplinary approaches to human cultures and the natural world. It also includes expectations for knowledge of creative expression, of sociocultural systems, of interrelationships between the human and natural world, and of modes of scientific inquiry into natural processes.

Such detailed delineation of outcomes, in turn, has provided a framework for the planned core curriculum. The new curriculum, unlike the old, will include courses that are explicit about learning goals and about how students will achieve them.

USM’s new core curriculum will emphasize learning as a developmental process.

Developmental Stages

USM’s new core curriculum will be distinctive in its presentation of learning as a developmental process with different stages. Core courses will span the undergraduate years, and the specific outcomes identified in USM’s vision statement will be fostered and assessed according to expectations for “introductory,” “developing,” and “accomplished” levels of learning. Prerequisites and transfer policies that ensure proper sequencing of courses “will support the integrity of this developmental learning,” Susan McWilliams says.

When the new curriculum is implemented, students at USM will begin their undergraduate education with a course in college writing and the Entry Year Experience (EYE), a team-designed, interdisciplinary course designed to introduce students to the goals of general education. (USM first piloted EYE courses in fall 2006, and the courses will be offered again this fall; pilot EYE courses are providing students opportunities to explore topics as diverse as shopping, natural disasters, and HIV/AIDS from multiple disciplinary perspectives.)

Successful completion of EYE and college writing will allow students to proceed to entry-level courses in creative expression, sociocultural analysis, and cultural interpretation. Meanwhile, completion of a required course in quantitative reasoning will make students eligible to enroll in Science Explorations, another entry-level course.

Students will then take a theme-based Mid-career Seminar in which they will consider ethical issues and reflect critically on their roles in society; as in other courses in the planned curriculum, students in this seminar will participate in cocurricular activities. Concurrently, students will complete a minor or an interdisciplinary cluster of three courses that explore a topic or theme in depth.

The final requirement of the new curriculum is the capstone, an interdisciplinary course centered around a major project or problem. In the process of completing the capstone, students will be expected to demonstrate that they have both integrated learning in the major with general education and integrated academic learning with their civic, professional, and personal lives.

From Plan to Implementation

General education reform at USM has been coordinated by a planning group that includes representatives from across the campus, including full- and part-time faculty as well student affairs and transfer staff and other administrators. Jane Kuenz, an associate professor of English who along with economics professor Michael Hillard has served as faculty cochair of the curriculum planning group, notes that the curriculum redesign itself has been a largely “faculty-driven effort”—a factor that has likely contributed to the success of the planning process and of the initial EYE courses that were piloted in 2006.

Susan McWilliams similarly stresses that the process has benefited from “inclusive, transparent, and participatory planning and decision making.” Although this sometimes leads to a “slower and more labor-intensive process,” she says, “it ultimately produces a better-designed curriculum.”

Despite such an open process, the curriculum planning group has faced obstacles. McWilliams notes that there is “resistance to such large-scale change in a time of scarce resources and institutional uncertainty.” And Kuenz says that some faculty members object to “the shift to an outcomes-based curriculum, which seems foreign, even off-putting and counterintuitive to people whose professional training has traditionally emphasized content specialization.”

Such concerns can be partly addressed, Kuenz says, by helping faculty understand how their disciplines fit into the general education plan, and ensuring that they see a role for their department in the core curriculum. Once faculty at USM "understood how they could draw on their own disciplinary expertise in various kinds of courses across a range of skill levels,” she says, they came to see the plan as something other than “an imposed constraint” and “began to pay closer attention to how these courses related to each other, not just to their major courses.”

The faculty senate will formally consider the curriculum proposal this fall, and if it is adopted, USM will proceed toward full implementation. The general education plan would be phased in gradually: by fall 2008 all new students would be expected to enroll in EYE courses, and Mid-career Seminar enrollment would be required by 2010. By 2012, the full curriculum would be in place—although as McWilliams notes, in implementing the plan USM “must be responsive to what actually happens” as the courses are taught and as student learning is assessed.

More information about general education reform at USM is available on the university’s Web site.

USM’s work on the curriculum was influenced by AAC&U’s Greater Expectations report and the campus’s participation in the AAC&U Institute on General Education. Additional resources on general education are available on AAC&U’s Web site.