General Education Program History
1995 to 2002
Dr. Sally Murphy
Director, General Education
Creating the General Education Program
At California State University, Hayward general education programs are subject to review on a five-year program review cycle and academic year 1996-97 was the year to review CSUH’s implementation of the CSU general education breadth requirements. Recent General Education reforms had not quieted faculty complaints that students were not adequately prepared for work in the majors. The 1996-97 GE review was given special importance as the faculty complaints were spoken publicly by the WASC accreditation team’s report that CSUH’s General Education program lacked “clarity, relevance, and meaning” resulting in “little sense of a unified and integrated academic experience for undergraduates at Hayward,” with little coherence or connection to majors. The WASC review team found “little evidence of University-wide planning for the reinforcement and full development of basic competencies in oral communication, critical thinking, and quantitative/analytic skills.
In Spring 1995, a small group of faculty was selected to constitute a GE Workgroup. Members included Mary Cullinan, Leigh Mintz, Grace Munakata, and Loretta Bruning and they were supported by the University to attend the Asheville Institute on General Education (sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities).
The 1995-6 GE Workgroup was augmented by two members of CIC and the full workgroup included: Chair, Mary Cullinan, Sally Murphy (CIC), Grace Munakata, David Woo (CIC), Leigh Mintz, and Loretta Bruning
The GE Workgroup organized campus-wide meetings of faculty and students to study CSUH’s current GE program, its problems and strengths, and to review some successful GE models on other campuses. The workgroup held a series of open meetings of faculty, staff and students to begin the dialogue on campus and to identify shared ideals, goals, and models for GE programs. Each group was asked to brainstorm ideas to address these three questions: What should be the goals of CSUH’s general education program; what structure GE should take, and what learning environment(s) would be conducive to the successful achievement of the goals. Ideas from this series of workshops were compiled by the workgroup and prepared for the coming year review of the GE program.
In Fall, 1996, CIC created a special GE Subcommittee consisting of two faculty members from each school, one representative each from the Library, the University Advisement Center, and Curriculum and Academic Programs, and a student member (who seldom attended, except at the very end of the process). The members were: Sally Murphy (Chair), Leigh Mintz (CAP), Znovy Radovilsky (SBE), Hadi Behzad (SBE), Don Sawyer (SEAS), Melany Speilman (SEAS), Kris Ramsdell (Library), Linda Kinrade (SOS), Kevin Callahan (SOS), Bill Langan (ALSS), Emily Stoper (ALSS), and Jackie Charonis (UAC).
The GE Subcommittee was charged with creating multiple models for a GE program that would combine teaching and assessing of fundamental skills, use structures and teaching methods known to improve student learning, and provide coherence and community for our students—all goals identified the year before by faculty, staff and students. Subcommittee members began with a review of the WASC report, information on successful GE programs collected at the Ashville conference, and ideas from faculty, staff and students compiled during the GE Workgroup’s university-wide meetings. The subcommittee also collected data about our lower division and upper division students: entering freshmen comprise 6% of CSUH’s student population, while 85% of the students transfer to CSUH. The average age of our undergraduate students is about 27 years; the average age of freshman is 18. When the subcommittee examined freshman course patterns we discovered that our freshmen were enrolling in upper-division courses during their first quarter, their grades were weak, they were not completing remedial requirements nor were they taking foundational courses to prepare them for the upper-division classes. While our retention of freshmen was about average for the CSU, we determined that we could make the first couple of years at CSUH far more academically appropriate and welcoming for the freshmen.
After much deliberation, the GE Subcommittee created three models and, after review by CIC, distributed them widely across campus to all academic departments and appropriate departments in student affairs, and discussed the models in an open forum held at a special meeting of the Academic Senate on February 11, 1997. The models ranged from thematically integrated courses that would combine the study of science, social science and humanities in a single learning community experience to a modified smorgasbord of courses from which students made individual selections. At the Academic Senate forum, considerable dissatisfaction was voiced over the models characterizing them as being either too revolutionary and lacking defined content or not revolutionary enough to satisfy the critiques of the current GE and lacking defined content (determining what should constitute general education in Science, Humanities, and Social Science was purposely unspecified by the subcommittee[1]). During the remainder of the Winter Quarter, the subcommittee held a number of open hearings soliciting both oral and written comments from all concerned members of the University community, and requested suggestions and criticisms about the models from members of each constituency.[2]
Using the data collected in the hearings and incorporating the information gathered in university-wide meetings the prior academic year, the subcommittee identified learning outcomes and learning environments that would support a high quality General Education program at CSUH and presented them to CIC on March 17, 1997 (see appendix A). CIC, after making revisions to improve the clarity and organization of the document, unanimously recommended forwarding the document to the Academic Senate for information and discussion(1996-97 CIC 21). The Subcommittee continued to refine their models of General Education based on the feedback from the Senate meeting and subsequent open hearings. On April 21, 1997, the subcommittee submitted its proposal for a new General Education program to CIC.
The vote in favor of the proposal was 8-0. Prior to the vote, the committee removed some suggestions handling transfer students whose GE was incomplete. CIC recommended further study of that issue. The new lower division General Education program, most dramatically restructuring general education for first-time freshmen, and the new Upper Division GE applied to all students under the 1998-2000 and subsequent catalogs. This new program, to begin in Fall, 1998, was approved by the Academic Senate on June 2, 1997 and by the President on June 17, 1997.
Key Features of the 1998-2002 GE program
The 1998-2002 GE program approved June 1997 made dramatic changes in the lower-division component of general education, building a learning community structure in which cohorts of first-year students and second-year students enroll in clusters of thematically-linked courses. The upper-division was modified to include advanced skills requirements (writing, speaking, critical thinking, and information literacy). The new program would be assessed to determine if or how well it accomplished the student learning and program goals. A more detailed description of the approved program follows.
Eschewing the “select one course from among the many approved for each of the following fifteen categories,” the lower division GE program is characterized by required yearlong, thematically integrated learning communities in humanities, in social sciences, and in the sciences. The learning community model addressed several critiques of our lower division GE program:
· Thematic integration provided a coherent learning experience that could model the complexity of problems humans face, the kinds of problems for which we are educating our students
· Cohorts of freshmen, and sophomores, enrolling together in linked classes aimed at helping the 6% of the student population who begin as freshmen on our commuter campus “get connected” to each other, the faculty, and the campus
· Linking the three Area A requirements for communication in English (Composition, Oral Communication and Critical Thinking) to each of the learning communities in the freshman year offered the opportunity to develop and reinforce the basic competencies in written and oral communication and critical thinking.[3]
· Continued development of composition, speaking, critical thinking, and information literacy skills in the upper division courses.
· Completing the freshman learning community courses were two new courses, an Information Literacy course,[4] and a one-unit General Studies course (taken each quarter of freshman year) designed to provide academic support for students in the learning communities.
The upper division component of the General Education program remained, in form, much like the 1996-98 GE program with two notable exceptions: first, activities supporting development of advanced skills in writing, speaking, critical thinking, and information literacy were incorporated into the three course requirements: Humanities, Social Science, and Capstone. Second, the inclusion of any course in one of the three upper division areas would depend on courses meeting the requirements of each area, rather than on departmental prefix or a presumption about where particular disciplines “fit”.
Implementation—1997-98
In preparation for the initial year of the new GE program, planning began early in 1997-98. The GE Subcommittee sent out call for proposals for freshmen learning communities. The call for sophomore communities would come a year later (see Appendix A). Meetings were held for all ALSS, SBE, and SEAS faculty to inform them of the requirements for the learning communities and to assist faculty in making connections with one another across departments.[5] In addition, the Chair of the GE Subcommittee met with most departments on campus to assure the faculty knew of the opportunities provided by the new program.
As proposals for learning communities were being developed, meetings were held with department chairs and directors of courses meeting Area A requirements to begin determining how the communication skills would be integrated in the learning communities. Similarly, the GE Subcommittee articulated goals for the General Studies course that would be included in the learning community each quarter of the freshman year.
During 1997-98 the GE Subcommittee determined how to schedule the “clusters” as CSUH’s learning communities came to be known. The intentional linking of courses required consideration of what would best assist student learning and students’ preferred schedules, departmental and university scheduling needs and restrictions, and registration procedures. Complicating the scheduling issues was the requirement that remedial work in composition and mathematics begin at the quarter of a student’s matriculation and continue until completed. The budgetary needs of the learning community program were identified and the GE Subcommittee Chair worked with the Provost to create a budget for training faculty and supporting the learning communities.
The GE Subcommittee Chair, with the assistance of several subcommittee members, met with enrollment services to identify needed modifications to the registration process to assist students in registering for all required linked courses in the clusters, including all remedial composition courses. The Chair also met extensively with the Director of Composition and the Chair of Mathematics to schedule sufficient sections of each of the remedial courses in their respective departments. We needed to make certain that mathematics remedial courses would be available to all students with developmental requirements, regardless of their cluster schedule.
The GE Subcommittee Chair worked with the Director of the Office of Faculty Development to design a summer seminar and a selected package of readings on interdisciplinary teaching and active learning to prepare faculty during the summer quarter prior to the clusters’ start in Fall 1998. All faculty[6] teaching in the freshmen clusters are required to participate in a week-long seminar to create interdisciplinary perspectives on the cluster theme that would integrate the discipline, library, composition, and speech courses in each cluster. A similar training was held for the sophomore cluster faculty in summer 1999.
Summer Orientation for freshmen also required major changes. First, we needed to alert students to the new structure of general education requirements. Second, we needed to train the advising staff on the new requirements and develop advising materials for both students and advisors. Finally, we realized that to manage the enrollment in both remedial courses and in the linked components of the clusters, we needed to register students at the summer orientation, something CSUH had never done.[7] The work on advising and orientation was completed before the first orientation was held.
The GE Subcommittee reviewed courses to satisfy the new Information Literacy requirement that required students develop their skills in defining, evaluating, using, communicating and appreciating information in its various forms using a variety of tools, including technological ones. Two courses were recommended as fulfilling those goals: Library 1010 and Computer Science 1020. CIC reviewed the subcommittee’s recommendations and the Academic Senate approved the Library course on March 10, 1998, and the Computer Science course on April 21, 1998.
Meanwhile, the GE Subcommittee began reviewing cluster proposals for Science, Humanities, and Social Science. First, the committee sent a request to each of the Schools asking that their respective Curriculum Committees identify student learning goals for lower-division General Education in the Schools’ areas of expertise. The need to stipulate content was an issue noted by the Academic Senate when debating the new program. The GE Subcommittee purposely did not attempt that task, believing the best articulation of learning goals would come from those the faculty in the schools.[8] Second, as cluster proposals began to arrive, the committee set up a procedure for reviewing clusters absent any specific learning outcomes. The number of clusters required was determined by the average freshman enrollment from the past three years expecting approximately ninety students in each cluster. The ninety-student cap provided sufficient student enrollment to support the courses in Critical Thinking, Composition, and Communication. The Subcommittee selected four of the five clusters submitted by the School of Science, including one cluster designed specifically for students with majors in the health sciences, and initially selected three of the four clusters submitted for Humanities and three of the six submitted for Social Science. An eleventh cluster was needed to meet the student enrollment and it was selected by determining the cluster with the highest number of votes not included on the original list. In that way, eleven clusters were recommended for the first year of the new GE program. The Subcommittee’s recommendations were approved by CIC on March 30, 1998 and by the Academic Senate on April 21st. [9]
As the planning year approached its end, it became clear that the new General Education program would require a coordinator. The GE Coordinator Search Committee interviewed candidates and selected Sally Murphy, Associate Professor of Speech Communication and GE Subcommittee Chair, as the half-time GE Coordinator. (Initially a half-time position, it is now a full-time faculty assignment.)