October18

From Gened

Announcement from Morello of the General Education Review meeting for October 18

As Rosemary explained at the last Department Chairs meeting, the charge is to have a set of recommendations completed by the end of the current fiscal year. This timetable allows for the faculty (and the appropriate faculty governance bodies) to begin deliberations on these recommendations at the start of the fall 2007 semester. The anticipated goal is that a revised general education program will be approved in time to take effect in fall 2008. This is an aggressive schedule, to be sure, but those are the goals that have been set forth for us.

To that end, I've attached four short readings as background materials. Two are brief excerpts from recent speeches by President Frawley in which he outlined some of his thoughts on general education and set out some general goals for a review process. A third reading is a short article on the general education process that Yale University went through. The final short piece talks about the typical challenges encountered during general education reviews, and offers some process suggestions for successfully negotiating those potential obstacles. These readings will hopefully provide some context as our group tries to get organized to initiate the work that lies ahead of us.