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A Foundation Strengthened
The university took the NCA’s evaluation as an exciting challenge. Instead of tinkering with the system, the university had the opportunity to scrap the old plan and to create a new one.
A Foundation Strengthened
During the next five years a faculty-led committee developed a completely new General Education format that was a dramatic departure from traditional systems that emphasized content knowledge. Courses would fit into two main groups: academic practice, which focused on learning methods, skills and theories; and general knowledge, which preserved a familiar content focus but added emphases on oral and written communication.
For some faculty, the new system was too radical. Understanding the content taught in foundational courses was vital to success in the advanced courses, they argued, and content consequently was more important to overall student success than skills. Supporters of the new plan countered that skills, such as effective oral and written communication, were an imperative for students in all disciplines and needed to be emphasized in General Education. Another source of contention was that the streamlined system would remove many courses from General Education. Faculty who worried about maintaining enrollment numbers in their courses fought to keep them. Moreover, it was not entirely clear how many existing courses fit into the new system, leading many to believe courses might require complete revision. During an occasionally raucous curriculum approval forum on Nov. 4, 1999, the proposal fell to defeat by a narrow margin.26
In response, a new “General Education Working Group,” co-chaired by Clifford Dorne, associate professor of criminal justice, and Eric Gardner, assistant professor of English, met frequently for a month in early 2000 to fashion a new proposal. Through careful listening to faculty, the committee realized that most were more comfortable with a traditional content-knowledge system. The committee established eight categories of knowledge that students would need to qualify for graduation (see Table 1). A joint faculty-administration governing structure, the General Education Committee (GEC), would approve the courses that departments wished to place within the new categories. Departments were to define goals for student achievement and collect data indicating how well students were reaching them. The GEC was to review departmental reports periodically. The faculty easily approved the new system during the ratification meeting that winter, and the university rolled it out for the fall 2000 semester.27
The committee also retained an emphasis on abilities assessment by creating two additional categories for writing and verbal communication. Drawing on support from the administration and the community, the university created awards incentives for the best students in writing and oral communication. In 1997, Ted and Ruth Braun, members of the Board of Control and community philanthropists, contributed the funding that established the annual Braun Awards for the best student writers in each college. The English Department recognizes best writers each year with the Tyner Awards, and the First Year Writing Program acknowledges its successful graduates with an award named in 2005 for Robert S.
