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Peer Review, Fall 2004
Creating Shared Student Responsibility for
General Education
By Eric R. White, executive director of the
division of undergraduate studies, and Jeremy Cohen,
associate vice provost for undergraduate education and
professor of communications, both at The Pennsylvania
State University |
While administrative responsibility for
general education most often falls within the purview of the
faculty senate or to a dean of undergraduate studies, responsibility
for the academic and curricular integrity of general education
is more dispersed. The typical general education program does
not have its own faculty community that engages in regular
reflection upon a body of collective knowledge, appropriate
procedures for discovery, shared curricular goals, and peer
review. Instead, the general education mosaic has many tiles,
each laid down by individual artisans. Faculty members take
responsibility for the academic quality of their own tiles--the
natural science tile, the humanities tile, the arts tile,
and so on. Each of these components may be very well made,
but students and faculty alike tend to perceive them as individual
course requirements only, rather than to perceive the shading,
outline, contour, and contrast of the mosaic as a whole.
One might hold up the disciplinary major
as a better model; disciplines do engender faculty communities
that engage in reflection about a body of collective knowledge,
appropriate procedures of discovery, shared curricular goals,
and peer review. However, instead of focusing on shared ownership
of general education by faculty, which we certainly encourage,
we propose here an alternative model of responsibility shared
by students and their advisors. Our unit of analysis is not
the content or the delivery of general education but, rather,
the development of an environment in which students learn
to take shared responsibility for their own learning.
Students and General Education
Reform
At best, most students consider general
education an obstacle to be gotten out of the way as soon
as possible on a mad dash to major courses; at worst, they
consider it a devious plot on the part of colleges and universities
to ensure that unpopular and irrelevant courses are filled.
Thus, regardless of how compelling the imperatives driving
it, general education reform--resulting in a new set
of courses, new modes of instruction, new themes, or any combination
of these--is unlikely to have much of an impact on students,
most of whom remain unaware of the reasons for the changes.
More generally, most students do not
understand the need for a general education component, which
may comprise as much as one-third of their college education.
This lack of awareness is compounded by the belief, reinforced
by our own practices, that a college degree represents no
more than the accumulation of a specified number of credits.
Given that general education typically is presented to students
as a subset of the total curriculum (e.g., six credits in
the arts, nine credits of sciences, six credits in social
sciences, and so on), is it any wonder that students approach
their educations without clear, well-informed intentions?
Notwithstanding the ubiquitous talk of
paradigms shifting to embrace active and engaged learning,
we continue to use the most sterile and abstract language
in explaining the general education program to our students.
The traditional approach is to communicate through pamphlets
or booklets that have all the imagination of a computer usage
manual and enough higher education jargon to challenge even
the most informed among us. In some cases, colleges and universities
simply provide students with a list of acceptable courses,
thus reinforcing the notion that a college education is no
more than an accumulation of credits.
Yet, we still believe our students will
come to some profound understanding of the purposes of general
education. The assumption that, by simply experiencing the
designated courses, students come to appreciate the notion
of general education and to understand its importance simply
does not hold up in practice. In fact, this approach almost
guarantees that any intended outcomes of general education
reform will be lost on the recipients. Instead, students need
structured opportunities to understand, plan, and implement
their own general education program.
Student Planning for General
Education
We propose that students and their advisors
meet regularly to discuss how best to craft the available
options--and how best to see general education not only
within the context of the baccalaureate degrees but also as
a foundation for lifelong learning. This approach requires
both the active involvement of knowledgeable advisors who
are sympathetic to the goals of general education and a structured
format for student reflection on individual courses of action.
Students should be required to complete
a general education plan, specifying which courses they will
take and, more importantly, why. One reason, for example,
might be to create a specific theme within the general education
categories (such as Black Studies topics, science, technology
and society interactions, or methods of communication). Drawing
from the arts, social sciences, humanities, natural sciences,
and mathematics/computational studies, all possible themes
would fulfill some of the purposes of general education, while
also allowing students to craft for themselves--and to
explain to themselves and to their advisers--their own
rationales for their choices.
The general education curriculum also
could be used to expand upon the major. This could be accomplished
not through additional major courses but, instead, through
collateral courses that expose students to alternate ways
of understanding a particular issue. And lastly, we should
not forget that general education can be used for intellectual
exploration. Students should be allowed to choose courses
either simply to learn about a new area or to follow up on
a purely avocational interest. Using a general education program
to pursue courses for no reason other than pure love of the
topic should not be abandoned as a legitimate rationale.
Documenting Student Plans
Students should be required to engage
in this planning exercise at least once a year over the entire
course of their collegiate studies--or at least until
the general education component of the curriculum is satisfied.
Rather than simply filing them away in an advising folder,
students' ongoing planning documents could be incorporated
into their electronic portfolios. This Web-based approach
would ensure that students always have access to their plans
and that they are free to alter them as necessary. Perhaps
more importantly, it would provide students with a cumulative
history of their own thought processes, reactions, and rationales.
This history of curricular choice would
be a powerful addendum to an official transcript. Indeed,
such an approach would fulfill the ultimate learning goals
inherent in curricular choice. Whereas a transcript indicates
only when a course was taken and which grade was assigned,
this curricular choice document--chronicling the intellectual
growth of students, in their own words--would serve as
an instructional tool.
To provide the impetus for students and
advisors to engage in this kind of sustained reflection, we
recommend that credit be awarded for maintaining such a portfolio.
Academic credit is the coin of the realm, and colleges and
universities grant credits to students who engage in far less
intellectual pursuits than understating the nature and purpose
of general education and explaining their own particular choices.
We leave it to individual campuses to decide how many credits
are awarded, under whose auspices they are granted, and other
administrative details.
General Education and Citizenship
One of the central aims of general education
is to help students develop the tools essential for constructive
participation in civic affairs--the tools necessary for
understanding the implications of how we view and respond
to the social, political, professional, and artistic environments
we inherit and then, altered for better or for worse, leave
for others. Accordingly, in helping students learn to take
shared responsibility for their learning, our model focuses
on developing the kind of shared responsibility relationship
a general education should engender for enlightened democratic
citizenship.
It is critical to recognize that our
current approaches for communicating general education to
our students are not effective. Fulfilling the promise of
our proposal will require the collaboration of many on campus,
including faculty, administrators, academic advisers, students,
and technology support personnel. Yet, there is much to be
gained by creating shared student responsibility for general
education, including a more profound understanding and appreciation
of this significant component of a baccalaureate degree. Ultimately,
however, we could gain better-informed citizens who would
give the challenges facing contemporary society the same deliberate
attention they gave to understanding how they educated themselves
and why.
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