This is a bit lengthy and not all parts of it pertain in our environment,
but given the popularity of gen ed reform in SUNY I thought some of you
might enjoy this one...
Jim Greenberg
The article is by Ann S. Ferren, professor of educational studies, Radford
University, and Ashby Kinch, assistant professor of English, Christopher
Newport University, appearing in Peer Review, Summer 2003, Volume 5, Number
4. Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American
Colleges and Universities http://www.aacu.org/index.cfm. Copyright ©
2003, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
THE DOLLARS AND SENSE BEHIND GENERAL EDUCATION REFORM
Ann S. Ferren
Ashby Kinch
Fiscal uncertainty has severely impacted curricular reform efforts as
faculty and administrators endeavor to maintain the momentum of
ongoing change in general education programs despite decreasing
resources--not just in dollars but also in faculty goodwill. On many
campuses, the general education committee aims to create a more
engaging intellectual community and a more coherent undergraduate
program. Individual faculty members hope to produce more committed
students with strong foundational skills. Administrators work to
strengthen the institution's academic identity. But when resource
constraints dampen the optimism of these varied campus
constituencies, the consequent clash between idealism and realism
becomes a serious obstacle to curricular reform.
Initial enthusiasm for change can make everything seem both desirable
and possible. To start the change process, the committee may review
promising practices on other campuses such as service-learning and
interdisciplinary courses. Sensitive to the need for full campus
support, the committee may also consult research on institutional
change to find relevant process strategies (Gaff 1980; Eckel et al.
1999). Too much attention to curricular design and approval, however,
can leave a campus unprepared for the practical realities of resource
constraints. At what point in the creative process should the hard
questions be asked?
The collaborative intellectual processes that generate an
idea-effective curriculum are not always the same as those that
produce sustainable, cost-effective change. Faculty generally play
the primary role in designing the goals and structures of a new
curriculum and leave it up to administrators to find the resources.
But in the current fiscal context for higher education, both faculty
and administrators need to be sensitive to the opportunities for, and
costs of, reform. Faculty must learn to calibrate the resources
required to actualize general education principles, and
administrators must not let cost considerations depress the
intellectual vitality of the curriculum. It takes both perspectives
for institutions to optimize their limited resources--financial,
physical, but most importantly, human--and improve the learning
outcomes of students, whose expectations and experiences ultimately
determine the quality of a general education curriculum.
Making Learning Count
Typically, general education planning sessions are highly energized
as committee members debate how best to enrich the curriculum,
enhance pedagogy, engage faculty, and ignite the minds of students.
The committee will tend to "dream big," calling for
resource-intensive innovations such as small freshmen seminars taught
only by full-time faculty. To support new emphases on diversity and
global awareness, they may suggest additional faculty and resources
for faculty development. If the program relies on co-curricular
experiences such as community service programs or residential
learning communities, they may suggest integrated staffing with
student affairs. To ensure the sustainability of the revised program,
the committee may recommend a director with an office, administrative
assistant, and graduate students for advising and assessment. All of
these "good ideas" take resources.
With student learning rather than resource management as its primary
concern, the committee will understandably be reluctant to jettison
promising strategies. To accomplish the goals in a cost-effective
way, a fiscal perspective is necessary to generate alternative
approaches. For example, integrating the freshman seminar with the
standard introductory writing course could achieve a key curricular
goal without additional faculty resources. Revising the major
capstone course to integrate leadership and civic engagement could
extend the general education objectives without adding courses
When confronted with resource limitations, the committee must
cautiously consider which ideals to sacrifice to ensure that they do
not unintentionally compromise program goals. They may decide, for
example, to trust voluntary involvement in faculty development or
rely on department chairs for oversight and assessment. But these
compromises may lead to insufficient guidance for the program,
resulting in neglect over time. Indeed, "program drift" may be the
primary impetus behind the call for revision. A general education
curriculum in place for a long time and taught by a variety of
faculty with different assumptions about the underlying principles
will show signs of incoherence to both students and professors.
Any committee charged with revising general education may want to
determine whether fixing what is not working by reenergizing the
conversation about learning will be more resource effective than
starting anew. Almost every program could be strengthened by raising
standards, making connections, and getting more synergy into the
structure and content. If a campus cannot afford to create new
writing-intensive courses, for example, it can be more intentional
about what writing should take place in which courses, establish
common evaluation rubrics, and tell students--repeatedly and
throughout the curriculum--that they are accountable for writing well
in all of their classes. In short, not everything needs reform and
resources; sometimes realigning efforts and refreshing faculty
commitment will produce the desired general education outcomes.
Reform Realism
As the committee does its work, the administration is optimistic that
a rigorous and attractive general education program will strengthen
admissions, assure parents and legislators of value for their
investment, support student retention, and provide employers with
high-caliber graduates. The president may even launch the reform
effort by enthusiastically saying, "Don't worry about resources. We
will find the money." And in some cases, tuition dollars captured
from competitors or gained through increased retention could be
significant enough to support the new program. A dynamic academic
environment can also attract gifts and grants to support the
facilities or faculty development deemed essential to the new program.
Few campuses have the courage, however, to fund general education
revisions based only on the hope of future returns. Consequently,
administrators know that to align current resources with the new
goals they must rely initially on reallocation. As ideas emerge from
the committee, the chief academic officer may be tempted to ask,
"What should we stop doing in order to fund capstone courses and
undergraduate research?" But finding the resources by top-down
cutting of underenrolled classes, eliminating unproductive programs,
or taxing all units would quickly lead to a loss of faculty goodwill
and doom the reform effort. The more effective strategy is to support
the committee as it shows departments how realigning resources to
address essential curricular principles throughout the four years can
strengthen both general education and the major.
To soften the inevitable clash between ideals and resources,
administrators can help the committee during its deliberations by
encouraging faculty to identify funding needs at the same time they
approve the new curriculum. For example, to guide reallocation of
resources based on clear principles, a final reform proposal may set
realistic standards for class size (to promote interactive pedagogy)
and the percentage of courses to be taught by full-time faculty (to
ensure faculty investment in the new curriculum). Administrators can
also help the committee identify resources in current curricular
offerings that might be invested for greater learning results by
analyzing workload, program productivity, and student progression
data (Ferren and Slavings 2000). All campuses are challenged to
produce more learning with limited resources in an environment where
general education competes with other priorities. Therefore, in the
end, courses, credits, and structures are not nearly as important as
understanding how changes will benefit students.
Time Is Money
Throughout the reform process, both the committee and the
administration must remain sensitive to the perspectives of the
individual faculty members who will question how the new program will
affect their personal allocation of time. Faculty resistance to
curricular reform is often characterized as fear of change, but
rational economists suggest that "opportunity cost" is the overriding
issue as faculty understandably weigh the time required to develop a
new course or learn new pedagogies against their current commitments.
Despite the committee's best efforts to create "buy-in" by engaging
faculty in the change process, the centrifugal forces of research,
departmental demands, and family place real limits on the time
faculty are able to reallocate.
Many campuses find "start up" funds for workshops, course releases,
and summer institutes as incentives. Lacking such resources, some
campuses try to strengthen their curriculum by finding faculty who
are already pursuing the desired goals and connecting these islands
of success to support the larger curricular reform effort. For
example, the committee could identify the faculty in sociology,
political science, and elsewhere who have already refined courses
that utilize service-learning to advance their own curricular
priorities. Using the principle "each one, teach one," the reform
committee legitimizes existing innovations and fosters continuous
improvement, thus reducing the need for radical reform and major
investments.
The recent widespread interest in interdisciplinarity provides an
excellent example of how alternative strategies for curricular
implementation can amplify the impact of existing campus resources.
To implement an interdisciplinary program effectively a campus must
consider how broadly and deeply it wants the concept to reach into
the curriculum. How many interdisciplinary courses should a student
take? Will the courses cross institutional divisions as well as
disciplines? Such questions guide a consideration of both the cost
and the impact of change. Interdisciplinary team-teaching, for
example, requires an up-front investment as faculty need release time
to plan courses together and initial student loads are unlikely to
replace the hours lost. The investment is recouped over time,
however, through such positive effects as pedagogical innovation,
cross-disciplinary research, and a greater sense of community beyond
the classroom. When there are no resources to invest, the committee
might locate faculty already fruitfully engaged in interdisciplinary
teaching and invite them to modify the courses to fit the general
education curriculum. If even that approach appears to take resources
from a department, interdisciplinarity can still be activated at
little cost, though in a far less robust form, by linking courses and
sharing syllabi across departments.
To stimulate the kind of intellectual inventory necessary to discover
where resources for reform exist, the committee and the
administration need to foster active, reflective communication among
faculty. Although expensive in terms of time, substantial and
intellectually stimulating conversation is the least expensive
stimulus for change and an essential foundation for a vital
curriculum. Faculty instinctively respond to intellectual
camaraderie; indeed, they complain bitterly when a deficit of
intellectual exchange with faculty peers diminishes their sense of
engagement with a broader academic community. Constant campus
conversations about student learning can result in reformed
pedagogical practices and more intentional curricula without changing
requirements, lowering class sizes, or inventing new courses.
During bleak fiscal times, faculty must fight off malaise and remind
themselves that they still control the quality of classroom
engagement. Good teachers are constantly engaged in pedagogical
self-reflection, refining assignment sequences, and rethinking the
fundamental practices of their teaching. A good administrator fosters
that endemic process by encouraging and connecting faculty and thus
optimizing the effect of good teaching by multiplying it across the
curriculum to create a shared sense of purpose.
What Money Can't Buy
Even if a campus had all the resources it needed to create its ideal
program, student resistance would still present an imposing obstacle.
Students tend to view general education programs as an incoherent set
of required courses of little relevance to their career interests.
They readily explain that they do not work as hard in classes they
don't like, and they develop resentment if they get lower grades in
courses that they feel do not play to their strengths. The
psychological cost of student resistance also takes a toll on faculty
who feel they are dragging along students whose only goal is "to get
it out of the way." The real dollar cost to the institution is
apparent when students repeat a failed course or take their tuition
dollars to the local community college to fulfill a dreaded
requirement.
Even more alarming is the data that full-time students expect to
spend little more than twenty hours a week on academics--including
class and study time. The national report Greater Expectations: A New
Vision for Learning as Nation Goes to College (AAC&U 2002) describes
the multiple challenges of limited time on task, underprepared
students, decreased funding, and the misalignment of high school exit
requirements and college expectations. As campuses make
learning-centered reforms a priority, general education programs
focus not just on significant content and important academic skills
but also on how to help students develop a love of lifelong learning
and the sense of social responsibility essential to participate
effectively in a complex world. Reform efforts must address the gap
between ideal outcomes of a general education program and the reality
of the needs and behaviors of the students.
What students ask for in general education--passion, enthusiasm, and
interest on the part of faculty--does not cost money. Even though
students focus primarily on their job prospects and often claim
internships are more important than art history, they do concede that
the breadth of the general education program, when taught well, is
good for them. But fostering intentional learning requires
intentional pedagogy. Faculty who teach in general education must
constantly renew for themselves the vital principles that animate
their teaching in the context of the curriculum. Faculty must conduct
with their students the same patient and painstaking discussion they
have with other faculty to establish shared principles, communicate
course design, and develop interdisciplinary connections with other
courses rather than teach only through the lens of their own
discipline. Students also need to understand their own role in
constructing a compelling whole out of their education, rather than
drifting through a fragmented experience. In this way, the most
important resources a campus has--student time and energy--are used
well.
Resolving the Tension
Too often, as a campus struggles with two co-existing
issues--insufficient resources and lack of clarity in how best to
accomplish a fundamental mission--discussions of finances drown out
conversations about learning. Consequently, a clear-eyed assessment
of existing resources--time, energy, commitment, ideas, and
budget--and a sustained discussion of common goals are necessary
precursors to ensuring that the reform effort will result in an
engaged community and empowered students. Administrators play an
essential but delicate role in helping faculty maintain their ideals,
understand fiscal realities, and test ideas against realistic
resource needs. At the same time, faculty maintain their ownership of
the curriculum through willing investment in the intellectual and
fiscal health of the institution. In the end, curricular reform is
about changing attitudes as much as it is about changing courses.
Although a realistic consideration of resource limitations is a
necessary context for curricular decision-making, ultimately, the
highest cost in curricular reform is the opportunity an institution
misses when it loses track of its ideals. n
References
Association of American Colleges and Universities. 2002. Greater
expectations : A new vision for learning as a nation goes to college.
Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Eckel, Peter, Madeleine Green, Barbara Hill, and William Mallon.
1999. Taking charge of change: A primer for colleges and
universities. Washington, DC: American Council on Education.
Ferren, Ann S. and Rick Slavings. 2000. Investing in quality: Tools
for improving curricular efficiency. Washington, DC: Association of
American Colleges and Universities.
Gaff, Jerry G. 1980. Avoiding the potholes: Strategies for reforming
general education. Educational Record. 50.
Mr. James B. Greenberg
Director Teaching, Learning and Technology Center
Milne Library
SUNY College at Oneonta
Oneonta, New York 13820
email: [log in to unmask]
phone: 607-436-2701
"Ignorance is curable, stupidity lasts forever"
|
