General Education Committee Working Group 1: Faculty

Convener: John McCullough

Recorder: Anne Leonard

Members: Candido Cabo, Susan Phillip, Ben Shepard, Barbara Grumet, Anthony Sena, Nadia Benakli, Gwen Cohen-Brown, Kara Pasner, Selwyn Williams, Peter Spellane, Jay Diner, Reginald Blake, Philip Russo, Robert Polchinksi, Lufeng Leng

Overall goal: to ensure a robust implementation of General Education across the curriculum

Goals of this group:

  • increase the faculty’s understanding of one another’s disciplines and develop faculty’s understanding of general education
  • assist departments in incorporating gen ed into their curriculum
  • develop a strong network of cross-curricular connections

Activities to advance this goal (1-3 during the year, depending on scale):

  • Develop list of general education learning outcomes from existing syllabi on this OpenLab site
  • Facilitate workshop on interdisciplinarity and establishing cross-curricular connections
  • Collaborate with WAC to produce a workshop on integrating General Education learning outcomes into courses through writing

Desired outcomes of activities selected:

Faculty in departments in which there are courses that lack Gen Ed learning outcomes will use the “clearinghouse” of gen ed learning outcomes available on the group’s OpenLab site to update syllabi.

Faculty who participate in the interdisciplinarity workshop will gain a sense of others’ disciplines, teaching, research

Targets, measurable if possible (how will we know the outcome has been reached?):

Timeline: January – convene group to plan interdisciplinarity workshop (planning group members are Susan, Kara, Gwen, Nadia, Anne, John)

February: continue planning workshops/events

March: Interdisciplinarity workshop; WAC workshop (or April)?

April; WAC workshop (or March)?

Constraints to be addressed: Attendance at workshops can be encouraged by department chairs and by working group members. All members of this group should join the OpenLab to facilitate communication.

Potential resources:

OpenLab
WAC
Learning Communities
Faculty Commons
Title V Living Lab