general education aka GEN ED

Sampling AAC&U: Peer Review

From the President Carol Geary Schneider "Intentional
and integrative learning have been themes in our work
at AAC&U for decades. But in recent years, the urgency
with which college leaders and faculty have embraced
these concepts has increased significantly."

Toward Intentionality and Transparency:
Analysis and Reflection of the Process
of General Education Reform Rita C. Kean,
Nancy D. Mitchell, and David E. Wilson
"Intentional learning requires transparency, strategic
choices, inclusive decisions, and revolutionary thinking.
Guided by these values, we hoped to be able to produce
a general education program that would help prepare
students for challenges they will face in the twenty-first century. "

Enhancing Intentionality in the
Requirement-free Curriculum
Laura Donnelly-Smith (print only)
Couldn’t retrieve this article, which
might be a hum-dinger anti-thesis
to the standard Requirement-Driven
structure of typical Gen Ed Programs,
what my friend Dr.Kahl calls: You-
might-hate-me-for-it-now-but-you’ll-
love-me-for-it-later.

This kind of talk (above—and consider the sound, too;
not just the content) will not be located in the disciplines:
math, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, history,
psychology, philosophy religion—what we call liberal arts.
.
Is it meta-disciplinary? Some kind of perspective that is
whole-system-more-than-sum-of-parts savvy?

The epi-phenomenal perspective called EDUCATION
—beyond the partiality of its constituents? Like a Jane
Goodall observing the monkey business: she surely would
see stuff the monkeys with their various rigorous agenda
would miss, ignore, eclipse, occlude.

Pedagogical? Originally a term indicating the trusted slave
who foot-walked children to & from school, but I had a student
call me depraved: using that word in class all the time: “You a
pedagogue, Sam? My mother warned me about people
like you."

Intentionality & Transparency: new buzz words in GEN-ED talk..
Used to be “critical thinking” some time ago. “Invitational.” “Global.”
During these times of rapid change.

I like the distinction Dan Pink (AWhole New Mind) draws between
the Information Age & the emerging Conceptual Age— between newly
emerging practical values of an MFA mind-set over the MBA. Oprah
loved his “take” so much she put a copy on the chair of every Stanford
senior at her address to the gradating class last spring.

Linear and ego-conscious purpose-driven values on the one hand.



Constellative, stochastic & exploratory expressive play on
the other hand.



The 2 Economies, as Gary Hawkins describes them.

You might be interested to know that the preliminary
Wabash data on our freshman indicates a level of enthusiasm
and interest in the Arts/Humanities way above the national
average for other colleges, especially including a desire to
create artistic works. I'm hoping the meeting will serve as
a way disseminating that kind of information for us to start
thinking about what its implications might be for the job we
are currently doing. (Jeff Holmes)

For the sake of argument:

Let the "disciplines" be as traditional & conservative as
they must be.

Let the GEN ED program be radical, innovative, not servant
to the majors--but antithetical, supplemental, experimental.

or

as Amherst once was and Brown still is: let it be
requirement free: up for grabs.

It's the arguing-IT-out that counts.
Or what's a college for?

xxxooo, Sam