General Education Curricular Initiatives

General Education
Discussions are underway to determine how we might re-shape the General Education program with the university’s core values as the integrating points.  The core values most closely related to diversity issues are “a global perspective and experience” and “ethnic and cultural diversity”.

A Dean of General Education was named in the 2004-2005 academic year with responsibility to provoke discussion, seek alternative and successful practices as well as assess the success of our current general education program in developing, in students, the understanding of diversity that we want to instill in them.

Current general education discussions are focused around the concept of creating a distinct program by having eight of the general education core courses be identified for specific years. Two courses would be designated as freshman courses, two as sophomore courses and so on. Through these eight courses, it would be possible to embed certain skills and values that cannot be effectively taught through one course alone; most particularly conversation has centered on embedding writing, critical thinking, an understanding and appreciation of diversity and an understanding of what it means to be a Christian.

According to our current discussion, students would be presented with some diversity concepts and issues in both their freshmen courses (Psychology 101 and Writing 110) but would be challenged to explore diversity in much greater depth during the sophomore year when they would have a Bible class (Old and New Testament combined) and a class on Diversity. The Diversity class may be created from existing classes such as POL 190, The Politics of Race, Class and Gender or SOC xxx, Cultural Anthropology or the class may be specially created, housed in an interdisciplinary general studies unit and taught principally by faculty members from Political Science and Sociology.

Bible and diversity would be purposefully paired in order to challenge students to think about what attitudes towards diversity the Bible and our Christian traditions invite them to adopt. Although diversity would be embedded into the examples and issues that students would encounter in their junior core, it would not surface as a major issue until students take their senior capstone course which would be a problem-based course, centered in a specific department, but always asked to incorporate perspectives from other departments and always to incorporate both a Christian perspective and connection to diversity issues.

Although general education talks are making progress, the work of building consensus and selling faculty on the idea of general education teaching as something that must be done with the larger end in mind, as a program done in cooperation with individuals from other departments—this work is slow, though the results will, hopefully, be high.