Integrative Designs for
General Education and Assessment
Network for Academic Renewal Conference
February 21-23, 2008
Boston, Massachusetts
Integrative Designs for General Education and Assessment will focus on ways that faculty, academic administrators, and student affairs educators can shape higher education’s response to calls for increased accountability while, at the same time, reinvigorating general education.
General education is often described in college publications and in faculty meetings as embodying core academic commitments, as an essential part of every student’s undergraduate education, and as an aid in developing our nation’s leaders, an engaged citizenry, and a productive workforce. In reality, higher education has struggled to live up to these core aspirations.
At the department level, teaching general education is often undervalued in the faculty reward structure, with chairs frequently seeing it as distracting from faculty members’ focus on students in the major. Students themselves habitually refer to general education as “courses to get out of the way,” and, although many clearly see connections between their success in the major and future careers, they rarely see the link between the goals of general education and long-term professional success. These realities and perceptions of general education can often result in faculty indifference and students who are confused about the purpose of general education.
And yet, a growing number of campuses have adopted new, integrative designs for general education that bring focus and vitality to the undergraduate experience. Recently crafted programs often feature a strong first year experience, designs for integrative learning at multiple levels, a new emphasis on “real-world applications,” and capstone experiences that connect broad goals for learning with deep learning in the students’ chosen field(s). Many institutions are making civic and global learning a unifying focus for their general education programs. Distribution requirements persist, but there is no reason to settle for a cafeteria design for general education.
These new integrative designs also provide new directions for assessing students’ learning in general education and across the curriculum. As students produce more “hands-on work,” college faculty are learning how to assess these “authentic performances” for evidence of students’ gains in the most common goals for general education, such as writing, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning and the ability to apply knowledge to complex problems.
Drawing from good practices across all sectors in American higher education, this conference will focus on:
- Demonstrating the value of general education as integral to undergraduate education through institutional approaches that meaningfully involve faculty and engage students
- Assessing levels of student learning and their ability to integrate learning across disciplines and throughout the college experience
- Supporting and rewarding the innovative work of faculty, student affairs educators, and academic professionals to articulate and realize the goals of general education
- Creating purposeful pathways that facilitate students’ progress in achieving educational goals from school to college, within an institution’s departments and schools/colleges, and among two- and four-year institutions
- Integrating general education, the majors, the co-curriculum, and effective educational practices to achieve essential learning outcomes as identified in College Learning for the New Global Century
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at 202.387.3760 or write to meetings@aacu.org.
Sponsors
Please contact the Development Office at (202) 884-7421 or e-mail Development@aacu.org for information about sponsorship opportunities for this conference.
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