General Education Essentials A Guide for College Faculty

by Hanstedt, Paul; Rhodes, Terrel

• ISBN13: 9781118321850
• ISBN10: 1118321855
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-05-29
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Summary

Every year, hundreds of small colleges, state schools, and large, research-oriented universities across the United States (and, increasingly, across Europe and Asia) are revisiting their core and general education curricula, often moving toward more integrative models. And every year, faculty members who are highly skilled and regularly rewarded for their work in narrowly defined fields are raising their hands at department meetings, at divisional gatherings, and at faculty senate sessions and asking two simple questions: "Why?" and "How is this going to impact me?" This guide seeks to answer these and other questions by providing an overview of and a rational for the recent shift in general education curricular design, a sense of how this shift can affect a faculty member's teaching, and a sense of how all of this might impact course and student assessment.

Author Biography

Paul Hanstedt is a professor of English at Roanoke College and the recipient of a FIPSE grant for sustainable faculty development, several teaching awards from three different institutions, and an Innovation Award for helping to create greater collaboration among faculty at his home institution.

Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is the leading national association concerned with the quality, vitality, and public standing of undergraduate liberal education.

Table of Contents

Foreword xi

About the Author xv

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction 1

PART ONE: THE BIG PICTURE 9

1 Structuring General Education 11

2 Some Examples of Integrative Curricular Models 25

PART TWO: GENERAL EDUCATION AT THE COURSE LEVEL 43

3 Designing Effective General Education Courses 45

4 How the Purposes of General Education Can Reshape a Course: Case Studies 54

PART THREE: GENERAL EDUCATION AT THE ASSIGNMENT AND ASSESSMENT LEVEL 73

5 Designing Appropriate Assignments for General Education 75

6 The Chapter You May Want to Skip: Institutional Assessment and General Education 94

Conclusion 107

Appendix A: Syllabus for Artistic and Literary Responses to Science and Technology 109

Appendix B: Syllabus for The Way Things Work: Sky Diving and Deep Sea Diving 117

Appendix C: Syllabus for Traveling Without Leaving: Global Sociology 125

Appendix D: Syllabus for Elite Deviance: Crime in the Suites 137

Appendix E: Syllabus for Does Gun Control Save Lives? 145

Appendix F: Syllabus for Statistics and Botany 151

References 157

Index 161