Creating Shared Student Responsibility for General Education (2020)

While administrative responsibility for general education most often falls within the purview of the faculty senate or to a dean of undergraduate studies, responsibility for the academic and curricular integrity of general education is more dispersed. The typical general education program does not have its own faculty community that engages in regular reflection upon a body of collective knowledge, appropriate procedures for discovery, shared curricular goals, and peer review. Instead, the general education mosaic has many tiles, each laid down by individual artisans. Faculty members take responsibility for the academic quality of their own tiles-the natural science tile, the humanities tile, the arts tile, and so on. Each of these components may be very well made, but students and faculty alike tend to perceive them as individual course requirements only, rather than to perceive the shading, outline, contour, and contrast of the mosaic as a whole. One might hold up the disciplinary major as a better model; disciplines do engender faculty communities that engage in reflection about a body of collective knowledge, appropriate procedures oi discovery, shared curricular goals, and peer review. However, instead of focusing on shared ownership of general education by faculty, which we certainly encourage, we propose here an alternative model of responsibility shared by students and their advisors. Our unit of analysis is not the content or the delivery of general education but, rather, the development of an environment in which students learn to take shared responsibility for their own learning. Students and General Education Reform At best, most students consider general education an obstacle to be gotten out of the way as soon as possible on a mad dash to major courses; at worst, they consider it a devious plot on the part of colleges and universities to ensure that unpopular and irrelevant courses are filled. Thus, regardless of how compelling the imperatives driving it, general education reform-resulting in a new set of courses, new modes of instruction, new themes, or any combination of these-is unlikely to have much of an impact on students, most of whom remain unaware of the reasons for the changes. More generally, most students do not understand the need for a general education component, which may comprise as much as one-third of their college education. This lack of awareness is compounded by the belief, reinforced by our own practices, that a college degree represents no more than the accumulation of a specified number of credits. Given that general education typically is presented to students as a subset of the total curriculum (e.g., six credits in the arts, nine credits of sciences, six credits in social sciences, and so on), is it any wonder that students approach their educations without clear, well-informed intentions? Notwithstanding the ubiquitous talk of paradigms shifting to embrace active and engaged learning, we continue to use the most sterile and abstract language in explaining the general education program to our students. The traditional approach is to communicate through pamphlets or booklets that have all the imagination of a computer usage manual and enough higher education jargon to challenge even the most informed among us. In some cases, colleges and universities simply provide students with a list of acceptable courses, thus reinforcing the notion that a college education is no more than an accumulation oi credits. Yet, we still believe our students will come to some profound understanding of the purposes of general education. The assumption that, by simply experiencing the designated courses, students come to appreciate the notion of general education and to understand its importance simply does not hold up in practice. In fact, this approach almost guarantees that any intended outcomes of general education reform will be lost on the recipients. Instead, students need structured opportunities to understand, plan, and implement their own general education program. …