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Changing General Education Curriculum

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

Bringing about any change in higher education is difficult. Curricular change is particularly challenging. The time-worn adage is that it is more difficult to change a college curriculum than to move a graveyard. And then there is general education. General education gets defined in different ways-philosophically, historically, structurally, or relationally.

General education curriculum is an integral part of the American undergraduate education course of study. Its heritage as a formal academic program began with William Rainey Harper's founding of the Junior College at the University of Chicago and the founding of the General College at the University of Minnesota (Ratcliff, 1997a). Over the years, there have been periodic examinations of how general education has been organized, conducted, and changed. In roughly ten-year intervals, Dressel and De Lisle (1969), Blackburn and others (1976), Toombs, Fairweather, Amey, and Chen (1989), and Gaff (1991) examined general education across American higher education institutions. Since the Gaff (1991) study, however, no national study of general education had been conducted. Here we take a practical, operational view of general education as a formal component of undergraduate education outside of the major, specialization, or discipline all students are required to take (Conrad, 1978; Toombs, Fairweather, Amey, and Chen, 1989).

This volume is about changing the general education curriculum-in big ways through significant reforms and, more frequently, incremental ways-to accomplish purposes better, to connect with students better, and to provide a more engaging and intellectually and emotionally compelling common collegiate experience. The chapters in this volume present the results of a recent national survey on change in general education curriculum; four case studies of institutions that have undertaken change (how they did it, what the constraints were, and most important, what the results were); and concluding discussions on the unfinished agenda of curricular coherence and the nature of change and when and how to bring it about.

General education is that ill-defined portion of the undergraduate curriculum that belongs to nearly everyone and is the sole province of no one. Although it may be the component of associate and baccalaureate degrees with the largest number of student enrollments and the greatest number of faculty members enlisted in its teaching, it frequently lacks its own organization, budget, and dedicated faculty. In a recent reaccreditation report to the Middle State Association of Colleges and Schools, a university (which shall remain mercifully anonymous) stated that although it had general education courses that all students must take, it had no general education program; rather, various departments offered the courses, and their impact on student learning was therefore difficult to assess. If general education is an overt component of a degree program and students are required to complete courses to fulfill that component, then the university has a general education program. Nevertheless, it is often the disciplinary departments that supply the instructional corps of general education, and it is most often those same departments that are fiscally rewarded for their success in servicing this central piece of the academic pie. General education frequently is governed by a revolving cadre of faculty drawn from the various disciplines contributing courses to its requirements. The faculty committee that oversees the general education curriculum, if the institution has one, tends to draw those interested in internal institutional service and those committed to preserving the resources accruing to their departments from the general education program. An associate provost, dean, or director frequently administers a program taught by borrowed faculty who seldom, if ever, convene to discuss the aims, organization, and outcomes of general education. More often, such faculty governance arrangements become the venue for determining which courses are approved to "count" as meeting general education degree requirements, thereby ensuring the offering departments and their faculty fully-enrolled, full-time-equivalent revenue-generating courses. Such subsidies have little to do with the aims, purposes, and assessments of student learning in general education. Thus, general education comes to the institutional planning and budgeting process as a stepchild and an afterthought. If change in higher education is complex and change in curriculum is especially thorny, then change in general education might be thought to be nearly impossible.

In fact, change and innovation in general education is not only possible but also prevalent. Under the auspices of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University, we undertook two surveys in 2000-the GE 2000 survey of directors of general education and the CAO 2000 survey of chief academic officers-of baccalaureate-granting institutions and found a majority to be engaged in general education change and innovation (Ratcliff, Johnson, La Nasa, and Gaff, 2001). Here we report trends and findings from these surveys pertinent to changing the general education curriculum. In addition, we invited case studies of institutions that have planned and implemented general education curricular change. These cases add context and variety to the notion of general education change. What we learned about change and about the unfinished agenda of curricular reform is reported here, as are the cases of four such institutions that undertook their own journey to change general education. In charting what changed, we have come to regard a curriculum as a key representation of knowledge, culture, scholarship, and perspective from which students of various backgrounds, interests, and abilities experience, discover, and gain understanding (Ratcliff 1997b).

In Chapter One, we describe and summarize what we learned about change from a decade of general education reform and revision. The GE 2000 and CAO surveys provide a broad-stroke picture of the activity, the changes, the organization, and the future of general education as we crossed into the new millennium. Like most other portraits, however, these surveys give a snapshot in time. To put this picture into perspective, we compare and contrast with two prior studies. Ten years earlier, Gaff (1991) surveyed chief academic officers, and Toombs, Fairweather, Amey, and Chen (1989) conducted a detailed and comprehensive examination of general education as reported in college catalogues. Taken together, the GE and CAO 2000 survey results and the comparisons with studies a decade earlier provide a picture of how change in general education is accelerating, what has motivated that change, and why. Far from the impossible, general education reform, revision, and redesign is not only possible but is found widely throughout higher education today.

Four case studies of changes in general education at different types of institutions add context to the survey results. The first of our case stories, the development of the general education program at Franklin Pierce College, chronicles a quest to create a distinctive curriculum-one that would differentiate this small New Hampshire liberal arts college from its competitors and one that reflects a...