1:30-3:30 p.m. 103 Gore Hall
 

Judy Van Name:

We will begin in a few minutes. We’ll give you a chance to take a seat. We’ve put the agenda at the seats this time. Thanks for coming out on this rainy afternoon.

I’m Judy Van Name, Chair of the Coordinating Committee on Education. I’d like to welcome you to the second Open Hearing of the General Education proposal, an opportunity for all members of the University of Delaware to be heard. Does everyone have the agenda and the attachments? They should because Rita put them at each place. O.K. The Coordinating Committee appreciates the presentations that were made last Thursday at our first Open Hearing on General Education. And it included a number of Named Distinguished Professors. While six of today’s speakers are the same, we have five new presenters. First, I’d like you to meet the members of the Faculty Senate Coordinating Committee on Education, three of whom chair other Faculty Senate committees: Bob Brown, Philosophy, Chair, Undergraduate Committee on Education; Joann Browning, Theatre; Carol Denson, (is not here yet, but she may be able to make it a little later), Bobby Gempesaw, Acting Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Planning; Alicia Glatfelter, our graduate student representative (and she’s in chemistry); Marcia Peoples-Halio (a former member of the General Education Committee). Marcia’s in English. Beth Haslett is in Communication and she is unable to be here. She was also a former member of the General Education Committee. Jeff Jordan, Philosophy and Chair of the Library Committee. Jim Richards is unable to be here. He’s in Health and Exercise Sciences and Chair of the Graduate Studies Committee. Cara Spiro, Business and Economics is our Undergraduate Student representative, and Rita Girardi is our Administrative Assistant in the Faculty Senate. Also Karren Helsel-Spry (sorry about tripping over that again) is our other Administrative Assistant in the Faculty Senate.

We have been discussing the General Education Proposal in our committee meetings this semester. The report is available on the web at www.udel.edu/facsen/reports/GenEdRpt.html I would like to correct the memorandum to all faculty dated December 2, 1999, announcing the Open Hearings. Both the Coordinating Committee on Education and the Undergraduate Studies Committee endorse the ten goals of general education for all undergraduate students. The Coordinating Committee on Education endorses the four components of the General Education proposal and the Undergraduate Studies Committee may do so in the future. All groups support the creation of an implementation and oversight committee for governance of the general education process and also recommend a pilot implementation strategy of the four elements of the general education proposal. These four components include a freshman year experience, basic skills development, a discovery learning experience, and a capstone course. We’re interested in sharing with you some alternative proposals for general education. We will proceed in the order presented on the agenda. Since there are eleven presenters, one more than last Thursday, we would like you to limit your comments to five minutes. And although we did not need to use it last Thursday, I brought my impartial timer along because I’m sure you probably don’t want to be here too long. It seemed to work well last Thursday without having to actually set the timer. So if you could keep your remarks to five minutes or ask if you would like a two-minute warning. Since the hearing is being recorded, please be sure to state your name and identification and speak normally for recording purposes. People were getting a little rambunctious and Walt had to remind us that you don’t have to speak louder into the microphone, just speak normally. Please save your questions until the end of the planned presentations at which time we’ll open it for questions, answers, comments, and discussion. The Coordinating Committee on Education will continue to meet in December and January to develop recommendations regarding the General Education proposal to be passed on to the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate and eventually to the Faculty Senate. We plan to update the information on the web as well as consider holding additional hearings as necessary. At any time the Coordinating Committee members will be happy to receive suggestions, thoughts, and concerns regarding the General Education proposal. If you put them in writing they may be sent to me in the Department of Consumer Studies or Rita Girardi at 164 South College Avenue, our new Faculty Senate Office by e-mail or campus mail. And now Bob will you please begin again by sharing the proposal from the Undergraduate Studies Committee.

Robert Brown:

I’m going to be speaking from the first sheet after the blue cover sheet and it also continues on the back. Last spring the Ad Hoc Committee on General Education delivered its report to the University Faculty Senate. The Senate received the report but took no action on it. The report was passed on to the Undergraduate Studies Committee for study this fall and we took it up. I’d like to point out two things about it. First of all, since this is a report coming from a committee appointed by the Senate and consisting of a very large number of people who worked over a long period of time. It’s the report deserving very serious consideration. And so we understood our role to be not one of a much smaller number of people in a shorter period of time conducting an independent evaluation of the report and deciding to ditch certain parts of it because we didn’t like it. We took our role to be one of turning the pros recommendations of that report into something more refined that the University community and the Senate could consider because the Ad Hoc Committee certainly deserves to have its recommendations seriously considered. The other comment I’ll make is since the Pathways Institute was already underway for January, we felt under considerable pressure to turn out something on the Pathways part of the report because people were thinking that Pathways might be instituted soon and we felt the need to address the question. If there was to be a Pathways requirement as the Ad Hoc Committee suggested it, then we needed to do some real refining on what sort of configuration a Pathways requirement should have if the University community decided to adopt it. 

So now if you look at our sheet the first numbered item on the sheet is the statement of the ten goals from the Ad Hoc Committee report. We simply… These are simply quoted from the Ad Committee report and it struck us that the University community might want to officially endorse these goals or perhaps some amended version of them. So our first recommendation was that the Senate take up this goals’ statement and consider it for official adoption. 

The second… I won’t go through the goals. We are all familiar with them and we can study them at our leisure. The second numbered item half way down the page is to deal with the question of a Pathways course requirement. And this is what we worked on very hard in many meetings during the month of October trying to refine what a Pathways requirement might look like. Let me first of all have you turn to the second page and look at number a) so we’re clear what we are talking about. We are suggesting that if there be a Pathways requirement, it be a requirement of a single course of three credits because various other Pathways’ possibilities were talked about (a four-credit course, several required courses). So everything we have in here has in view a one three-credit course. Now if you turn back to the first page you will see a statement there that says establish a Pathways course requirement for all associate and baccalaureate degrees. And then there is a statement as to what one considers a Pathways course to be and this statement is one we crafted simply by cribbing language from the Ad Hoc Committee report. The word normally appears at the beginning of the description leaving a little wiggle room in case a course didn’t perhaps meet all of these specifications but did extremely well. On all the ones that didn’t meet, we didn’t want to tie the hands of a committee that would be approving a Pathways course too tightly. So the word normally is in there. The conception of a Pathways course is that it’s on a broad theme that is developed by a team of faculty collaborators from several disciplines. 

The second component is that it be taught in sections of 80 to 100 students--no more than that. Certainly it could be taught in the smaller size section than that with the specification that the sections break down to discussion groups of no more than 20 each at least one day a week of the scheduled class meetings. There is nothing in the description of the Pathways that says the course must be team taught. It just says planned by a team in collaboration. So it could certainly be independent sections, each one of which is conducted by a single instructor but presumably some of the format and the knowledge conveyed in the sections would be developed out of the collaborative activity that went on before the courses began. 

Number 3. A list of activities or exercises that should be included in the Pathways course. Several comments I think need to be made on this. First of all, be very clear that there is no intention that such a course would replace English 110 or replace a mathematics requirement or other requirements of this sort. Those courses and requirements would stay in place so you should not think of a Pathways course as attempting to do what those courses do as if they would somehow vanish. That would put an enormous burden on a Pathways course which should not be put on it. The other comment on this is don’t assume that the rather daunting list of activities and elements under number 3 are all to be provided in the one discussion meeting per week and presumed be provided by the supervision of the teaching assistant. There is just supposed to be in the course in some way. Nothing to prevent a lecturer from illustrating mathematics and computer use is valuable in studying the topic in question. So there is no suggestion that the one discussion meeting per week is supposed to be a computer lab and a session of scrutinizing written work in the way that English 110 written work is scrutinized or there is no suggestion that the TA’s needed to work with Pathways would require training which would make them, in effect, computer science instructors or English 110 instructors or public speaking instructors. The idea is simply that these components should find some place in the course so that it’s made aware to the students how these various kinds of skills of activities are useful and valuable in studying whatever the subject matter of the course happens to be. And then there is the specification that one wants to have the Pathways course be a coherent gateway into the University experience.

If you turn to the second page then we figured that then if there is to be a Pathways requirement, if the University community should decide to adopt the Pathways requirement, then these are the features that it ought to have ( a three-credit course; a four-credit course would not fit well into the existing curricula of a number of rather tightly structured majors, so we didn’t want to impose that on anybody; and two credit courses would be difficult to fit in.). So one-three credit course would be a requirement which would go into place for a group of newly matriculated students and you would state that entry date whatever academic year that would commence with. You would need to have a transition. At least the transition academic year before that in which some pilot Pathways courses could be conducted for a smaller group of students on an experimental basis. 

Under D. the conception is that a Pathways requirement, if adopted, should not add to the number of courses that students currently have to take. It should be a general education course that colleges would be obliged to count toward their existing general education requirements both for the students who would do it in the experimental group in the transition year and for everybody once it’s required. We didn’t want to…So the college would have to say by virtue of theme which one of our existing general education requirements in humanities or social science or whatever it is does this course most nearly corresponds to and then we will count it as that. That would then relieve the student so that the burden of having a additional requirement piled on top of existing ones. 

We suggested that Pathways courses should have a common UNIV rubric at the 100 level. A series of numbers created and then individual themes would be treated as special topic courses using those numbers so that when the themes are newly created they would not have to go through the course approval process the way an entirely new course would. They would be approved by virtue of thematic appropriateness for Pathways by the Committee would certify Pathways courses. And, of course, this would have to be so approved. And then since this is to be a first-year experience, we recommended that it would be front-loaded that way so that registration priority and Pathways courses would go, of course, to those who need to meet the requirement over those who do not. And then of those who need to meet the requirement first year students would get priority over second and third year students who may have delayed meeting the requirement. We wanted a strong dis-incentive to delaying meeting the requirement. If this is to be an entry way into the University experience, it doesn’t make much sense to be doing it as a sophomore or a junior. Along those lines, we assume that, just as with other requirements, substitutions or excuse from meeting a requirement could be granted by Associate Deans, who do the graduation check out for students just as is the case now. Those people would make judgement calls as to whether transfer students for example would be asked to do Pathways or not. People coming into the University with credits already earned at another institution. Then we as far as the other recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee we felt that these required further study before instituting as requirements and so we listed them under number three among the tasks that would fall to a committee on General Education that we recommended be created. Such a committee would be a University Senate Committee. It would in some ways be subordinate to the Undergraduate Studies Committee but it would not be a sub-committee of that committee in the sense that it would be populated by the same people. While the Undergraduate Studies Committee has more than a full plate now, and so you would need other people to do this work. They would approve applications for certifications of Pathways courses. And I forgot to mention that Pathways courses would be identified the way multicultural courses are now in the schedule booklet and on the transcripts so that there would be no question as to which ones were the Pathways courses. This committee would certify and re-certify Pathways courses meeting a Pathways requirement and would be commissioned by the Senate to study these other proposals and to make suitable recommendations as to how they might either be instituted or give cogent reasons why they are unwise and not recommended for further action by the University community. We suggested that such a committee should be preponderantly made up of elected members from the various colleges elected by the faculties of those colleges so that there would be no concern that such a committee might be stacked either by the Senate committee creating process or by deans. That’s the reason for that provision. Thank you.

Judy Van Name: 

Thank you very much, Bob. And now Carol Hoffecker will talk about the Pathways workshop.

Carol Hoffecker: 

Thank you, Judy. I want to thank the Coordinating Committee for holding these Open Hearings and thank all of you for coming. Those of you who were at the Open Hearing last week know that it produced a very good discussion of a lot of issues about this whole set of recommendations. And I think that has been very helpful to the committee and to all of us who are concerned about these matters. I’m asked here to talk about how we are going forward right now in helping faculty who wish to do so to learn some methods that will assist them in developing courses that might fit into the Pathways curriculum. Some people were critical of us for going forward with this before the Senate acted. We were encouraged to do this largely because we had gotten a big grant from the Hewlett Foundation that had to be implemented within a certain period of time. And also, because we saw this as an opportunity to develop some pilot program kind of courses that would have a Pathways format. And we recognized that these courses would have a very good chance under the current general education requirements to be certified by the various colleges to meet the current requirements. So it is not as if we were jumping the gun on the creation of a new set of requirements but rather that we were creating an opportunity for faculty to take a look at a new way to meet the existing requirements. Any how as many of you know, we are going to hold the first of these week-long institutes in January. It will be January 24 through the 28. We got quite a few faculty members who asked to participate and sent us application materials including ideas that they wanted to develop for their courses. We now have somewhere in the vicinity of 25 to 28 faculty who are planning to participate. And quite a stellar list of folks, some of whom are in this room, who are going to be participating as well as presenters in this process. Those of you who are unable to participate in January but who want to do so, are invited to join us in the second round which will be the week of May 29. Some people have wondered should they do problem-based learning programs in addition to the programs that we are providing. The answer is "yes". I think the two fit very neatly together as a package. There is every reason to do both of these things, not one or the other. So I hope that will address some of the questions that people have.

Just wanted to use the balance of my time to address a few of the issues that came up the other day in the hearings at that time. One was the issue of the appropriateness of Pathways for all students. One speaker very eloquently said that members of his family and other very thoughtful students might find this a "little Mickey Mouse" and that they would rather get right into the meat of stuff instead of being stuck in a Pathways course. All I can say to that is Pathways courses are not designed to be Mickey Mouse. They are not going to be designed to be "high schooly" and they are not going to be designed to be thin water. They are going to be designed to be very thought provoking and I think that they are courses that if properly put together would be inviting and exciting even for those of us who are in this room presently to learn new things. Furthermore, the Honors Program, which presumably gets the best and the brightest is already using concepts similar to Pathways in their own program for freshmen and will continue to do so. So we are not talking about something that is going to be stripped down but rather something that is going to be inherently interesting and vibrant and exciting. If it isn’t these things then it should be.

A second question that has come up is the question of whether or not we are going to institute this all at once assuming that the Senate passes this. Do we go "galunk???" into this the very next minutes. Or do we phase it in? Well, I’ve already sort of addressed that. It makes excellent good sense to run a pilot, see how it works, see what the problems are; fix the problems, decide then how it should be phased in beyond that. An issue came up in the meeting the other day about "How about all the people who are sophisticated in mathematics and science being stuck in some Pathways course that’s been designed for people who are mathematical and scientific idiots? Well, this is a potential problem. But it doesn’t have to be a problem. It doesn’t have to be a problem at all. Good advising can steer people, you know, who are scientific geniuses into solid Pathways course that will truly be eye-opening for them. Not only eye-opening but also congruent with the rest of what they’re going to be studying in a different way from anything else that they will be sent forward into afterwards. For example, if one is going to be a chemical engineer, there is a lot of likelihood that one will work for an oil company. And wouldn’t it be a great thing if that’s going to be your destiny in life to know something about how the international oil industry operates. Well that’s nothing you’re going to be learning very much about in an engineering course, but boy it’s certainly going to be useful. So there could be a Pathways course designed to deal with the whole idea of energy as it is used world wide, who controls it, who consumes it, who pays for it, who makes the money off of it, what does it do to the environment. All of these kinds of issues can be in a Pathways course that people who are advising over in engineering could say, why don’t you take that one? And steer away from the one that is redundant or does that stuff that you already know. There are ways to get around these things. You just have use good advising. And indeed the colleges themselves are going to have the ultimate power over how they steer they students into Pathways courses. Now the next speaker is Dean DiLorenzo and he is going to be talking about FIGS (Freshmen Interest Groups). And we who served on the Ad Hoc Committee on General Education did think about FIGS and indeed we see FIGS as being a way of structuring the freshmen year that can be extremely exciting and that can involve a Pathways course, E110 and another course put together in a package that will work very well. It will work extremely well in those curricular situations where there is a good deal flexibility in scheduling. Perhaps a little less well in those curricular situations as for example in nursing and engineering where students have more restricted scheduling. But that can be worked out later. That’s not the big issue. The big issue is should there be the opportunity to have FIGS and to work Pathways into them. So I will stop before my time is up and I thank you all for coming again and for being so interested in what we are trying to do here and again I thank the Committee for holding these hearings.

Judy Van Name:

Thank you, Carol. And Dean DiLorenzo.

Thomas DiLorenzo, Dean:

Isn’t Carol a hard act to follow? By the way Carol how do you spell galunk? Actually, she did a wonderful lead in. I’ll be brief because I think she has said it nicely. What I’d like to ask you to consider is expanding the possibilities for the Pathways experience. That the Pathway course as constructed might be quite usable and as Carol mentioned the FIGS concept might be quite usable as well. I think that what Bob has laid out is a nice overview of what Pathway requirements might be and that we might achieve these requirements in a number of ways. Let me give you an example of what a Freshmen Interest Group is. I participated in this about a year ago at the University of Missouri. Twenty students are co-enrolled in three classes revolving around a theme. Now there is no change in the course structures. The numbers of students that are usually in those courses remain the same. You don’t have to change the overall numbers. The three courses that I participated in was an intro psych section, an English section very similar to our E110 here, and a communications class. I think the title was Median Society. I can’t quite remember but it was a fairly low-level communication class. Now my class had three, four, five hundred students in it and the communication class had a hundred, a hundred fifty, and the English class had about twenty students. Those twenty students in the English class were co-enrolled with twenty of my students, and twenty of the communication students. And they participated in this freshmen interest group. Now there may have been other students in my class that were parts of other freshmen interest groups. That was fine but these students were co-enrolled in the classes. They actually formed natural study groups. The research that I have seen show that engineering students did quite well on retention and graduation rates. I am told mostly because they created these natural study groups especially in calculus. They did much better in the calculus class than they may have done without that experience. They are often linked to residence halls and so students have a natural place to study together and a natural group that they are with throughout. Students can pick. It’s totally voluntary. They can pick to be involved in these experiences. And indeed, it was so exciting there that it grew from about fifteen FIGs the first year to next year where there will be eighty-eight FIGs. These are just around themes, various themes. I’ll just mention a few more of them to you so you will get a feel for it. Commerce and Society, Exploring Careers in Business, Spectrum of Behavior, Women’s Health, Modern Culture, and it is just a combination of three classes. Let me give you nutrition, general chemistry, English and Concepts and Controversies in Nutrition. They are around themes. There are demonstrated positive aspects to FIGs as I think you will find with the Pathways experiences or the Pathways courses, It increases in retention rates, increases in graduation rates, increases in involvement in important freshmen experiences. The students that participated in these did a better job of those. And increases in interdisciplinary experiences throughout. Let me just close by saying that as a consequence of this experience, I actually attended an English conference which I probably would never have done. Not because they are not necessarily wonderful things, it’s just not my discipline. And it was really quite interesting to be involved with faculty members from other disciplines as could happen in the FIG concept, as could happen in the Pathways course. So I think that there can be lots of excitement revolving around this. Let’s try and maintain as much flexibility as we can. And let the implementation committee put it together later on. Thank You.

Judy Van Name: 

Thank you.

And now Jeff Jordan will present a summary of where we are at this point. Rita pointed out that you might have an extra page attached because some didn’t print very well. It’s the last document and if you have a third sort of part to that, it’s simply the second page printed. Jeff.

Jeff Jordan: 

So take out your third page in the packet and I am going to basically cover that. I am basically going to cover what’s already been covered. So it’s my job to be redundant. During November the Coordinating Committee received the report from the Undergraduate Studies Committee. We discussed it extensively, ad nauseum. We received a panel including Dean DiLorenzo, Chair of the Chair’s Caucus, several chairs of different departments, president of the Faculty Senate, and had a lengthy discussion with them. And from these meetings, from the Coordinating Committee discussions here today is where the Coordinating Committee stands. First we can say that all groups have endorsed the ten goals. You are familiar with these ten goals but they are printed on the back of the sheet that you have. So the ten goals from the original Ad Hoc Committee have all been endorsed by all the groups. 

Second and here really is the key provision. Second all groups endorse the concept of a freshmen experience. Now that sounds simple and straight forward but it‘s important that you realize what is being said there. The concept—by concept is meant something or other. Alright and that’s the key. Something or other. The concept of a first year freshmen experience and what would fulfill this concept is what we are discussing today. Pathways course would fulfill it or FIGs would fulfill it or a combination thereof would fulfill it. And so that’s what is really under key discussion is given that there is to be some first year, some freshmen year experience, what exactly will that look like. And that’s what is under discussion. And so it is important to emphasize number 2 where we are talking about the concept of a first year or a freshmen experience. We’ve not settled on that.

Third, all groups strongly favor but believe further discussion is advisable regarding the three other major elements of the Undergraduate Studies Committee. And those are the acquisition of skills, discovery learning experience, and a capstone course. 

Fourth, as Bob Brown also mentioned all groups endorsed the idea that the first year experience augment but not replace existing Gen Ed requirements. So we are not talking about dropping current requirements but augmenting those requirements.

Fifth, all groups endorsed the creation of an Implementation Committee and Bob Brown mentioned this. Again, if you flip the page over and look at b) you will see the description involved—the mission statement of that committee. 

Sixth, basically the sixth point is the same. We introduce. We don’t introduce it all at once. We introduce this step by step. We assess. We use a pilot program. We try to be as flexible and as careful as possible. Thank you. 

Judy Van Name:

I’m going to diverge just a bit from what I said earlier. I’m wondering if there are any pressing questions that you want to ask at this point. If not, then we will go on to the other presentations that have been requested. Cindy Okolo. Is Cindy here? Okay.

Cindy Okolo: 

Do you want me to speak from here or do you want me up there? 

Judy Van Name:

Why don’t you come up here? We’ll use the side mikes for discussions, okay?

Cindy Okolo:

Good afternoon. I’m Cindy Okolo. I’m an Associate Professor in the School in Education and for the last six months I’ve been the interim associate director of the School of Education. In that role I’m the program coordinator for the elementary teacher education program. A lot of our discussion so far has focused on the Pathways component of the proposal or proposals. What I want to speak to is the discovery learning proposal or that component of the proposals. I know that some of the remarks that I am going to make have been made before but I think that they bear repeating because they are very important to us. We are very concerned about seeing them addressed as proposals move forward.

As an Associate Professor here for the last ten years I’ve taught in undergraduate methods course. And a component of that course has been a clinical experience. My students have been out in classrooms in their junior year working with teachers. And I have worked closely with the people, the professionals who have enabled that experience to occur. The professionals who have located classrooms, who will work with my students who, who have supervised those experiences. Most recently in the last six months I have worked with most all of the faculty members and professional staff in the School of Ed who are involved in providing clinical experiences for our students. So I speak from having quite a bit of experience with the clinical component of our program. And that’s an important component of the elementary teacher education program or the ETE program is our clinical experience component. Our students are involved in clinical experiences from sometimes their freshman year but no later than their sophomore year. They are out in a variety of classrooms doing a variety of tasks, observing students, interviewing them, providing one on one tutoring, to accommodate experiences as eighteen weeks student teachers working full time in classrooms practicing teaching. We feel those clinical experiences are critical to the success of our program. And we feel that they are really critical to the challenge of preparing good teachers. So they are very very important to us. And that’s why I want to speak about the implications of the discovery learning experience on programs like ours. The ETE program represents the largest declared, undergraduate major on campus. We serve about a thousand students. And so I am concerned about what would happen to our program if all University of Delaware students were now required to do a discovery learning experience. I fear that this would be bound to compete with programs like ours that have a heavy reliance on clinical experiences. We place students in hundreds of classrooms each semester and we are literally to the point where we are scrounging around to find more classrooms that will work with our students because our numbers are growing. That’s not happening only to us at the University of Delaware. It’s happening to our competitor schools, to Wilmington College, to Widener, to Lincoln, to other universities with whom we compete. They are also trying to find high quality clinical placements for their students. And obviously there are a limited number of classrooms out there. And I fear it’s naive to think that a discovery learning experience would not compete with us for classrooms. Classrooms are going to be a great place to be involved in service learning and experiential learning. And if we have all of a sudden a large number of students outside our ETE and other teacher education programs who want to be in classrooms, I fear what that’s going to mean for programs like ours. Competition for access to classrooms and schools really couldn’t occur at a worse time and I think we have to also as we move forward consider the larger context in education. These are tough times for education as you are all aware that teachers feel like they are under siege. Teachers in Delaware are very concerned about accountability, high stakes assessment, having their students pass the statewide tests. We find now that schools are saying to us "We fear we can’t work with your students." In the testing grades, in grades where students are tested on these high-stakes tests because what if students in the classroom, a high proportion fail the test and parents claim because it’s because a University of Delaware student was there teaching them instead of a regular teacher. So classrooms are wary about working with us. Not only that, but there is an aging teaching force. And many teachers are retiring; many more new teachers are coming in. They are just getting their feet wet. They are not at a place where they are ready to be good clinical sites and mentors for our students. And then because there are so many new teachers on the teaching force many of the veteran teachers in schools are being asked to serve as mentors to the new teachers so they are not available to be clinical teachers or mentors for our University of Delaware students. So it concerns me the idea of having many, many students who are possibly competing for placements in the schools at this time. I know it may seem counter intuitive that schools wouldn’t want our students. We’ve all heard a lot about the sorry state of American education. And it often seems to be that people feel the fix is to send willing, motivated, young people out to the schools to help out. To lend an extra pair of hands in the classroom but given my experience and that of many of my colleagues in doing clinical experiences, it’s not that simple. An extra pair of hands often means extra work for an already busy teacher. And what we found and I’m sure many other teacher education programs here on campus would agree with me that good clinical experiences require that our students are well trained and that they are well supervised. And I wonder where that comes into the discovery learning component of these proposals. What will be the provisions given for training, for the supervision of students who will be out there in clinical sites because without the training and the supervision it’s a high risk that experiences will not work out. Not only will the students not have a good experience, perhaps, the people working with them will not have a good experience. Now when I teach my methods course, I tell my students. We talk about professionalism. I observe the degree of their professionalism. I evaluate them on that. I tell them you guys are representative of the University of Delaware. It’s really important that you convince people that the University is a good place. We are good people to work with. Whatever you do to students out in that classroom is going to affect future students because teachers in schools are going to be willing to work with us if you are a good representative of our program. Well if we send students out to schools now who are not well trained and not well supervised and monitored, are we going to be sure that they are going to be good representatives of our program. Or are they going to work against programs like ours that count on having the continuing support and involvement of teachers. So I am concerned about that too.

In closing I’d like to commend the Ad Hoc Committee and the other committees for the care and creativity that have gone into the original proposal and other proposals. I am grateful for this opportunity to share my thoughts which I would like to point out also represent many of my colleagues who could not be present today. I urge the Senate to consider carefully the implications of the proposed discovery learning component and if it is implemented even on a pilot basis I would like to urge that there is close coordination with our programs and programs like ours to ensure that the quality of existing programs is not sacrificed. Thank you.

Bob Brown:

Judy allowed me to make a comment after this and I was just going to do it my seat but Jeff said get up there to the microphone and grab my pen for me. I left it up there. So I just wanted to say that I think that some of the concerns raised could be answered but this is an excellent example why the Undergraduate Studies Committee recommended that there be a very careful study of things like the discovery learning experience to find out not only what exists across campus but what problems might arise from instituting such a requirement. That would take more than just a public hearing or two or a few minutes committee deliberation, which is exactly why that’s been put on the back burner for now.

Judy Van Name: 

Jan Blits, UD Chapter of the Delaware Association of Scholars

Jan Blits:

Thank you, Judy. I’m Jan Blits, Vice President of the Delaware Association of Scholars. I’d like to speak today about the Pathways courses. I’d like to raise some questions about what Carol Hoffecker at last week’s Open Hearing called the "thorny issue" of TA’s staffing those courses. While the Gen Ed Report gives a lot of attention to the faculty for the proposed Pathway courses, it gives almost no attention at all to the TA’s who will be involved in the courses or it makes light of the problems. Yet much of the Pathways courses success rests squarely on the TA’s. More, in fact, will be asked of the TA’s than is perhaps ever asked of any senior faculty including the faculty who will be teaching Pathways courses. Besides sharing with the instructor the responsibility for introducing greater coherence into the undergraduate program, the TA’s will be responsible for teaching writing and public speaking skills, quantitative reasoning and critical thinking among other things. Each of their twenty students will quote "write several reports that will be graded for both content and writing and each student will give at least two oral presentations that will be critiqued for effectiveness." That’s not all the TA’s will be teaching subject matter outside their fields of graduate study. Where will the University find enough TA's to cover approximately two hundred sections a year? And where will the University find TA’s who are sufficiently qualified to accomplish one let alone all of the Pathways goals? The writing component is an obvious problem. At an Open Hearing about a month or two ago Carol Hoffecker said a good number of the TA’s could come from the English Department. But in fact the English Department could not staff its E110 courses if any of its graduate students were channeled into other kinds of work. The English Department has a difficult enough time staffing the various service courses with S contract people. The associate chair there said the loss of even one grad student would be serious and material. Perhaps then the TA’s might come from other graduate programs and be given training to teach writing. Here again there seems to be an enormous problem. Graduate students teaching English courses receive at least one semester of master’s level training in the teaching of composition before going into the classroom. The Gen Ed proposal would require, however, only "a training period of three to five days in late summer to prepare the TA’s for all of their obligations, not just writing." When asked some defenders of the Pathways proposal seem to try to temper expectations. We heard some of that a bit earlier. Well the writing component they say won’t be on the level of E110 or the math component on the level of Math 114 and so on. What kind of courses then will the Pathways courses be? Will they be even college level courses? I think that there is no way to escape the fact that not withstanding the high blown rhetoric about exciting students in learning and teaching them basic intellectual skills, the Pathways courses would in fact be watered down courses. Carol, I think, valiantly denies that they would be Mickey Mouse courses but I think we’ve also heard that when people defend them specifically the content diminishes considerably. The more we hear about courses specifically, the weaker the courses sound. 

There’s also a great problem for the TA’s themselves. These students are studying in order to learn chosen scholarly fields. The Pathways courses, however, will generally pull them away from their fields and their mentors, and while dividing their time and attention, greatly burden them with responsibilities which are at once extraneous to their studies and excessive in themselves. The courses would overtax graduate students while short changing the undergraduates. The DAS is concerned also about the Pathways courses effect on the University as a whole. Delaware enjoys a reputation for undergraduate instruction by faculty rather than by TA’s. Our reliance on faculty for instruction is a major reason why many good students come here. It is also a major reason why UD’s national ranking has kept climbing in recent years. The Pathways courses, however, threaten this success. While the courses would be a conspicuous part of our undergraduate program, students in them would interact primarily with TA’s rather than with faculty. And TA’s would grade them. Ironically in the name of upgrading undergraduate education, the University would in fact be shifting a large and important part of freshmen teaching from faculty to non-faculty. It is hard to see how either the quality of our undergraduate instruction or our present reputation for high level undergraduate instruction can escape unharmed. I hope that the Pathways proposal does not go to the Senate before the administration offers clear solutions to the question of adequately staffing the two hundred Pathways discussion sections a year. Thank you.

Judy Van Name:

Linda Gottfredson

Linda Gottfredson:

Good afternoon. I’m Linda Gottfredson. I am a senator from the School of Education. I appreciate the opportunity to speak here again. I was reassured to hear from Carol Hoffecker at the last meeting that the administration is now perfectly content to phase in the proposal. Much of what was said by the General Education proposal’s strongest advocates, however, have only confirmed by concerns. Let me begin with the question that Ken Ackerman brought up last time in which Carol Hoffecker rightly described as the key issue. What’s our goal here? What is broken and what are we trying to fix? According to the proposal surveys of students and alumni reveal a lack of coherence in the under-graduate program. If incoherence in the program is the key problem, it’s not one that applies to the pre-professional programs at the University such as ours in the School of Education. We’re not broke, so please don’t fix us. It will only make life harder for us and our students. Our elementary teacher education students have no electives whatsoever. None. Zero. Nada. In fact, to get just one professional certification the minimum for actually teaching in the schools ETE students need 125 credits to graduate. That’s five more than it takes for a student to graduate from the University. Students who wish to take a dual certification, for example including one in special education, which many of them feel compelled to do in order to be competitive, to be marketable, need 134. Our program is already coherent and is streamlined as we can possible make it. We could potentially trim away a required course in what we call the discipline areas to make room for a Pathways requirement but it would be robbing Peter to pay Paul. When we know Peter is worthy but we can’t be sure of Paul. This isn’t augmentation; this is substitution. By substituting a Pathways course could still create problems for us and our students in scheduling. Because fitting in designated Pathways courses would further constrain an already highly constrained schedule. We have no flexibility to spare. It might be wise for the Coordinating Committee to check with the other pre-professional programs, not just ours, to see whether the problems that the proposal points to actually apply to them and whether its proffered solutions will actually complicate our ability to provide the education our students need and want and which the State of Delaware expects from us.

The program coherence was not the goal that proponents stressed at the last hearing. Instead, it was getting students interested in learning. It was enticing the apparently feckless freshman mind not as the original coherence rational suggested feeding those eager intellects who come to us by providing them a deeper and more coherent education. This new freshmen mind rational suggests that the chaired professors are right. That we might be setting out with Pathways courses to pander the students with an easy dilettantism. I know that interdisciplinary courses can be taught well to freshmen. And indeed that’s just what I try to do every semester though I doubt that all of us can be Harry Shipman’s. Moreover, superficial courses that pose as deep can give students very much the wrong idea about an educated mind is and does. But the concern I wanted to emphasize by bringing up this new rationale is this. Is the freshman mind the problem that needs fixing? That’s not what the proposal said. But if it is, this too, is not something that’s broken in our college. Our education students come to us highly motivated and directed. Moreover, they want practical experience and we give it to them. The shifting of rationale for the Pathways component itself reflects a troubling incoherence in the curricular reform process. 

Something else that particularly troubled me at the last hearing is what Ray Wolters described as the glass problem. I understand the enthusiasm of the many Gen Ed proposal advocates but even if we could agree on our goals and solutions there really are feasibility issues that deserve closer attention than they are now getting. I said at the last meeting that mandating field experiences or their functional equivalent could conceivable cause enormous problems for the School of Education, like other units in CHEP in carrying out their mandate to educate teachers and for UD to assist the schools. Cindy Okolo has amplified those concerns further. They are urgent. The answer to this concern at the last hearing by some advocates was that 54 percent of UD students are already having some sort of discovery learning experience. The implication was that adding the other 46 percent would be no problem. But let’s look at a few numbers that should give pause. Of that 54 percent reporting some experience, at least a fifth, eleven or twelve percent are education students of some sort. But realizing that most of those students are required to have at least one experience per year for each of their four years. That means that education students may count for half of all field experiences at the university. Knowing intimately how much time, effort, and resources it takes to produce high quality discovery experiences, as Cindy Okolo described, we in the School of Education would also ask as she did earlier, what the quality of those experiences has actually been for the remainder of the 54 percent. And would be for the next 46 percent. In short, I think, we need clearer answers to three questions. What are we really trying to reform? Where is it actually needed? And are the solutions feasible? 

I like to conclude by going back to Carol’s reassurance that the administration is willing to phase in the proposal. According to the University’s bylaws faculty have full control over the curriculum. Indeed it’s the only control it cedes to us. The administration is, of course, welcome to explain why it wanted or may still want immediate and full implementation of the General Education proposal. But we should object to any intimation that the task of the Senate or any of its committees is to implement the administration’s wishes and quickly besides. That the proposal seems to be rushed through the Senate only stokes the impression that this might be so. I hope I can be proved mistaken on this count. Thank you.

Judy Van Name:

Mark J. Miller representing the Ad Hoc Interdisciplinary Migration Group

Mark J. Miller:

Thank you very much. I am Mark Miller from the Political Science Department and I’m here at the request of my colleagues and what we call the Ad Hoc Migration Group that includes Farley Grubb from Economics, Roger Horowitz who use to be in History and now is at Hagley Museum, Eder Schreider from Geography, Viv Claff from Sociology and we’ve had other members of our group. As I stand before you I just want to correct the misapprehension that interdisciplinary cooperation on academic matters is something recent. The migration group was formed a long time ago. I don’t know how many years ago it was now, but at least ten years ago. It arose from practical needs. We served on honors committees with one another. We did various functions for international studies on campus and so we felt a need to form to share our experiences and quite frankly at least ten years ago we talked about the desirability of having an interdisciplinary freshman level course such as we are considering right now. So I think there has been a misconception that this is all something very recent. We view the recommendations that have been made as something that’s an outcome of a natural evolution. And I also would like to assure you that we intend to give a very challenging freshmen course. We think that we are going to be able to come up with something that’s very exciting. There is going to be no dilution of scholarly standards. Just the opposite, we intend to make this a truly challenging course. We’ve been meeting from time to time. It’s difficult, of course, meshing schedules on an interdisciplinary basis and across colleges but we are pretty confident that we can come up with something that will be very interesting for freshmen level students by the summer. Now we also see the interdisciplinary cooperation as something that enhances our professional life as professors. I can testify that we have learned a tremendous amount through the interaction of the other members of the group who bring these different disciplinary perspectives to the study of migration. So in that sense it’s been a very positive experience and I hope that our own experience can inspire others to go ahead in this way. Now, I don’t need to take too much of your time. I’m just here to convey my enthusiasm for the proposals that have been made and to add that from our perspective by creating, if we are approved of course, a migration course as a pathway course. We think it will create more coherency in international studies at the University of Delaware. We think it will help foster linkages to more advanced level course. We think that such a course would be an optimal way to teach about growing diversity here in the United States and diversity around the world. We think that this is the most objective way to teach about growing social, society diversity. Thank you very much.

Judy Van Name:

OK thank you. John Hurt

John Hurt: 

Thank you very much. I’m John Hurt from the History Department. I don’t really represent anybody. Except that I have a vote in the Senate so I thought I might come in and share with the Committee some of the things that I might not have to say in the Senate in a few weeks, a few months, or whenever that is. Like some of the others, I’ve been concerned with the problem of the issue of a substantive content in the Pathways courses. Carol has done something to reassure me and I’m starting to feel a little less dubious but I still have a couple of suggestions to make and one is that I think the text should be revised or added on to. It seems to me you just need some definition of a Pathways course to take into account its goals, its objectives, criteria for selecting Pathways courses, a text that would be sharp enough to exclude inappropriate things. I mean I’m sure the committee is not trying to turn the General Education program into an action news promo. But I would like to have a good solid text before we vote. I speak here with a modest amount of experience. More years ago than I care to recall I did something what Carol has done but for the College of Liberal Arts and Science. That is I actually wrote, well it was a committee thing, but I did most of the writing. It was a proposal for general education reform. Like Carol’s it met with some approval and encountered a good deal of flack and it took about two years of considerable study and advising by which time I was gone from the process and forgotten about it before it gave birth to what we have now. Not much of which really resembles what we put into the hopper in 1979 but I am coming to a point. Some of my language did actually survive I was thrilled to note. And due course it appeared and was quoted in the Department of History which is what I have said I am from. And there it was given a completely erroneous construction and interpretation. Let me tell you it did no good for me to be there and to say that I wrote those words. They came out of a committee deliberation. This is concretely what they meant. On the department sailed in defiance of the text. So not only do you need a text but you need the University’s team of attorneys to ? that text. And you need to put it in real concrete. I thought that FIGs idea was good. I think that using actual courses in the coordination with Pathways allays some of these apprehensions, too.

My second point has to do with implementation. Carol had used another good word there which was phasing. I don’t know if this has been in play before but I hadn’t heard it. But I thought that 2001 which Bob Brown used was not only the title of a good movie but at least it shielded me from the thought that we might be doing this in September or who knows just when. I would suggest that maybe we could add slight refinement in phasing and have a fail-safe point where we evaluate the Pathways and see if we want to go ahead full steam. There is a period in which they are optional—voluntary. We had a good deal of experience with this sort of program it seems to me. I taught in the summer humanities program years ago, and then Jay Halio’s humanities a semester. They were all thematically oriented and interdisciplinary. I thought they worked quite well. I still don’t see how they can possibly be expanded to cover a University freshmen, sophomore population of 3,000 odd. But here I could just be, you know, mistaken. In any case, implementation, phasing, options, before a full scale that would seem to me to help. Here’s another idea—quite radical I admit. I suggest a faculty vote. Maybe it could just be a straw vote of the whole faculty since this is a general program. Maybe just a straw vote, but something to bring to the floor of the Senate to approve that the proposal has general faculty support.

I was at a lunch on Friday with some of my colleagues. Opinion was unanimously against the Pathways and the whole proposal. I attended a lunch today. Carol was there too. Opinions seemed to be much in favor. I don’t know where the balance lies and it seems to me that the Faculty Senate needs to know and that the program needs to know. No matter what reservations we’ve expressed here, if a substantial majority of the faculty believes in it and wants it, it will work no matter what. We need to have some democracy in action.

One final point which is a little more precise than some of these other general ones. The proposal talks a little bit about writing and language skills. Here I think we can make a bit more progress. In this area I can say what I like because Carol put me on one of the committees that worked on skills. I wasn’t happy with our work and so I don’t feel any need to defend it. Writing is a much more serious problem for our students and we can address this in a separate track or in coordination of this proposal or a revision thereof or something needs to be done. I think we all have experience when passing students regularly mistake peasants for pheasants and its for it’s and so many are well I don’t know how many but I read a lot of student writing in my work and para-literacy would be a good way to describe some. We don’t seem to be doing enough about it. I don’t know whose fault it is. I guess it’s my fault, too, but I think it’s a whole separate problem. I’ll conclude with one final anecdote. My son is a graduate of the University of Delaware. He didn’t win a Rhodes scholarship but he did graduate on time. I am just as proud of the one as I would have been of the other. And when I attended his graduation a few years ago I met some of his friends and their parents. I found that the parents were universally approved of what the University of Delaware had done. They felt that had spent their money wisely. I got the impression that they would have spent a lot more if we had only asked and sort of wished that we had. But here was one positive appraisal which may not please you all that much. One of the parents explained to me that their son had long had a problem with writing in high school. And he often encountered difficulties with his high school teachers but these problems had cleared up at the University of Delaware. And why was this? Because we had not asked very much writing of him. They thought we had been much more reasonable than the high school back in New Jersey and for that I feel surely would have paid a good deal more if we had promised that in the beginning. Let’s see. Judy I have a little statement here. It’s not nearly as formal as the others but you can put it in your files where those files go. Thank you.

Judy Van Name: 

It will go in the Faculty Senate files. And we have another speaker James Brophy. 

James Brophy: 

Thank you very much. My name is James Brophy. I am an Associate Professor of History and I am chair of the History Department’s Undergraduate Studies Committee. I come here just to make a suggestion. It’s more procedural than anything. I’ll piggy back on some of the suggestions already made. There is a lot of misunderstanding or apprehension about this Pathways idea—the whole reform and the public documents that are out there haven’t done their job to inform the faculty generally and universally about what it is about. The one that was on the web—the public document that’s been most referred to—is very general. I think it was written in committee. It’s trying to please everybody. It’s somewhat vague. And this produces many questions and it did answer our queries. And in this respect there are still a lot of questions about it. And that can mean opposition but not necessarily so. There could be support here for it. There could be more support for it if people had more concrete information as to what this constituted. So in this respect, it seems to me before we go ahead and it goes back into committee and to get to rush it to votes, rush it to the Senate, it seems to me that you need to build a broader base of support for this, a broader constituency. At least as Undergraduate Chair people have been asking me questions. The documents that we have studied we can’t answer them concretely. And we charged our senators to go to the meetings to get some information, to collect information. We do not yet have it. In our last departmental meeting we were still dealing with vague generalities. And for this reason I was charged to come to this meeting and ask the committee to hold two more open hearings next semester—in late February and early March—to insure a genuinely open colloquy between the Senate and its constituency—the faculty. It is my belief that the faculty is not yet sufficiently apprised of the proposed reforms and its ramifications. The public documents and the reforms provided not enough clarity on the matter and my department members were also very curious about the reforms and we would like to attend. But these meetings were organized on such short notice I believe we had about a week. It was notified a week in advance. And very few of my colleagues in the history department could attend. I think planning the open hearings the last week of classes and during exam week which is an impossibly busy time for our colleagues is not the way to promote a rational and critical open discussion of these reforms. If it is the committee’s purpose to have a well attended caucus to inform the UD community of these reforms then we should have more hearings in late February and in early March. You don’t want this to be a pro forma of exercise. You want to send the message that we really want to hear from the base. You really want to hear from the entire UD faculty and about their suggestions. 

Before this happens, before these late February and early March meetings are held, the Faculty Senate Coordinating Committee on Education should produce a new document that would formulate the present state of proposed reforms and their implementation. There again, given the evolving process of the proposed reforms and the revisions of Dean DiLorenzo, the existing document available for public consumption seems to be out of date. I don’t know if I’ve read the November report of the Undergraduate Studies committee but the one that was on the web at this point seems somewhat out of date. And this document furthermore leaves many of the important questions unanswered. Questions that were answered for me today in this hearing but are not answered in the documents. Okay, and in this respect questions about be required, or optional, or the interdepartmentally, of these courses. There are a number of things that we need to address. So I would strongly recommend that a new document… It seems to me that there’s new issues on the table. The question of FIGs versus the Pathways. How are they complimentary to one another? I think there should be a discussion among faculty members which is perhaps better—clustering these groups together already standing or should we have new Pathway lecture courses. They can both exist but what’s the requirement? We need to know the impact on these courses on our department. For us planning surveys, how are we going to establish skill levels, etc? There are just a lot of basic questions that we need to address. 

My colleagues also were apprehensive about graduate training as well. And this has already been stated in this meeting. Is it appropriate for Ph.D. candidates to be required to assist in courses that have little bearing on their fields of expertise. How does it help them get jobs if they taught courses on oceans or money or energy when they are supposed to be teaching American history? I’m not sure. Perhaps. Perhaps not. It needs to be discussed. It seems to me that it would have been positive to invite the graduate chairs of the departments to a meeting. Or invite the undergraduate chairs or in some way include more people in this decision making process. I would also agree with my colleague earlier who talked about field work and internships. We have a number of them right now in the History department but we would struggle, very much so struggle, to find meaningful, meaningful internships for all of our 400 majors. It would be well… impossible. And to make it really a meaningful exercise worthy of three credits, we also have to talk about the faculty workload involved. A meaningful internship would mean an interim report, a few papers, discussion, and when you have 400 majors and 30 faculty members that means more work. And how is that introduced into the workload policy, etc.? Perhaps this is too persnickety perhaps but these are things that need to be thought about and addressed. 

Let me once again urge the committee to write a definitive report that can be studied and discussed, schedule new hearings in late February and early March, and organize a coherent campus wide discussion. For all of you here, someone mentioned nausea and that you guys talked it to death. I completely understand that. But for us out there it’s rather new. And these meetings came as a surprise to me. It was hard. I am glad to see some of my colleagues from the History Department here but would have been here had it been scheduled at a time that we could really attend. So in this respect, I know there’s a sense of urgency to keep the momentum going with this reform but this process should not be overly rushed. Central for the success of this reform is building a broad base of support that will insure the proper implementation of the reform and the reform needs a mandate from the faculty. It doesn’t need to squeak by. You don’t want to give the impression that you’re shoving it down our throats. You want to get a support for this.

Judy Van Name: 

You’ve all raised very good points and we are listening very carefully. I’d like to just add before Mark Huddleston leaves (caught him in the act, didn’t I) that, I believe, I’ve been at all the Faculty Senate meetings this fall and he has been announcing this since our September meeting that we are working on it. But you know I am listening and I think these are excellent suggestions and points and we are one staff member short right now but we will get something on the web unless I hear any objection to that. But also, I wanted to state and not to be defensive (and Mark you may slip out—I just wanted to credit you for keeping people as informed as you could.) Let’s see I’ve lost my train of thought. Sorry about that. Oh, yes, the other point was that we really came with open minds to get your input about the concerns because we were afraid that we couldn’t possibly think about all these things. And so, I guess one of the reasons we decided to operate that way and I really credit this committee, who has been outstanding, in doing so and I should also credit Beth Haslett for reminding that we do need to get things on the web so that it’s more easily accessible to people. But I think we have made progress between our first hearing last Thursday and this one and we are listening carefully. Committee do you have other things? Bob?

Bob Brown:

I would just like to make one clarifying remark. The problems with the discovery learning proposals are significant ones and people should study them carefully. But I want to remind people as they discuss it that the suggestion for discovery learning was not just that everyone be placed in some kind of off-campus internship. The suggestion was one might do that or one might have study abroad. Or one might be involved in undergraduate research. There was a menu of options proposed so it’s certainly not a question that certainly the whole student body is going to have to be serviced by one version of these options. But still the questions raised about placements and making this a meaningful experience are legitimate ones. Just don’t think of them as having to serve thirty-five hundred students each year. Because many of those will be served by other means if that becomes a requirement.

Judy Van Name:

OK. At this point we’d like to open it for comments/suggestions/ and questions. Yes, and please remember to say your name. I saw your hand first. (Voice in background) David, would you mind coming to the mike because of our recording of this? We can hear you but it helps because we are keeping a record.

David Pong: 

It will be very short. I will probably be done by the time I get here. 

Judy Van Name: 

Humor us.

David Pong:

I don’t have big thoughts. I think the idea of having a meeting with the graduate chair and the undergraduate chair of each department is a wonderful idea because Carol Hoffecker is the graduate chair of the History Department. I think she can meet with herself. But a little bit more seriously I would like to ask Bob Brown about the second page of your report. Item number five towards the bottom of the page, you talk about multicultural requirements. And you say that there is something that is more detailed and has a more nuance approach to multicultural requirement and I am very intrigued by that and I wonder whether you would like to elaborate on it.

Bob Brown:

I am going to pass the ball to Carol Hoffecker on that because she informed me that there was an element of that she thought was rather unaccountably or accidentally left out of the final report of the committee. So this is just a passing reference to that and she is the one who should state what that means.

Carol Hoffecker:

Well I think it was an oversight. That paragraph got lost. That paragraph should be back in. Furthermore, I’d also say that maybe as you go for the sake of the historic recording I know that the members of the committee are going to spend nights listening to these records. At the institute that we are about to have, we are going to devote on one of the five days to multiculturalism. And unfortunately, the two of the three people are going to be involved were in the room and just left. But we are going to try to give faculty ways of thinking about their proposals and techniques and some suggestions for readings and activities that would bring a multiculturalism within the United States and the views of cultures outside those that are within the United States into play in their courses. Now it’s conceivable that in some Pathways courses, because of the nature of the content, that may play a lesser role and in others it may play a greater role. But nonetheless it was the expectation of the Ad Hoc Committee and a number of members of the committee and I must say I was just one member of the committee. The one who happened to be the chair. I wasn’t that big a deal. It was the expectation of the Ad Hoc Committee that the Pathways courses would help students to get started a number of but by no means all of those ten goals. But two of the goals that we particularly hoped that the Pathways courses would address were goals nine and ten which are the multiculturalism within the United States and understanding cultures and nations outside of our own. And to broaden student basis on understanding beyond the rather insular mentality that many students bring with them to the University. So I hope that helps a little.

Judy Van Name:

Let’s see. Vera was your hand up earlier? There were two. Okay then we’ll go here and then to Vera. And please if you would come to the mike on the side for recording purposes. Thank you.

Juan Villamarin:

My name is Juan Villamarin. And I have been here in the University of Delaware for thirty years. I have been chair of my department for twenty-two years. And there are a lot of things that I don’t understand from the university. I’m a foreigner. I came from a colony because that’s where we are in Latin American and I decided to have a real life and a varied view and I was very intrigued in terms of dialog and discussions that I found in the university that I went as a graduate student. Also I am a cultural anthropologist. And as a cultural anthropologist I think one of my duties is to represent the underdogs and pin point their views. Something that is not satisfactory taken here in the University. Here people tell me what multicultural is. People tell me what I should think. People tell me how we should do things, and that’s culturalism. Also for me I have a major problem in terms from the country that I left and the policies that we have, and how we are going to produce students in terms of taking an active role when they have important positions in the government. We are talking here about something that is not very popular, and a Dean, an Interim Dean of Arts of Science told me that’s it’s not something useful to discuss. Migrations—we have Maya—the Mayans that are now in Georgetown, Delaware. We were involved with the watermelon army for 20 years in a terroristic effort to eliminate Mayan culture in a large number of villages with the cost of about 200,000 people. When we talk also about ethics. Whose ethics are we? When we talk about the role that we are playing in Colombia in terms of the drugs and spending in the next three years four or five billion dollars. In an area that in the last ten years has been a displacement of about two million people, there have been more than 50,000 people dead. So we are very selective, and we are very selective in terms of what we choose to do or not to do. But if we really have an interest in terms of the students, we have to teach them in terms of a wide comprehensive dialog, in which we are not told what we are going to do. And this is, in part, what happened in Seattle. For the great surprise to us, not a surprise for the Europeans, but in terms of what this country is going to face in the future. It’s not a shallow thing in terms that you are going to be a multicultural institution. You have to go in depth and understand what it means in terms of it--what is the world system in terms of it? Why resources and labor are important is the question. 

The last thing that I want to tell you that as Chair of my department, I have received requests from four different units of the University, and my answer is "no, no, no, no." What they’re asking is that my faculty will teach more and more and more with less return. And this is not what is involved also in the Promotion and Tenure or in terms of academics in the states, but is increasing terms in the amount of labor. The last thing that I want to do is that I was in trouble a year ago—deep trouble. I had a heart bypass operation. My surgeon looked me iffy, and I did promise my family that I would not be in trouble again, but I’m trying to get out of trouble here because I think it’s very important, it’s very important that we stand up and discuss what we believe in. And globalization and the terms like that in terms are fake terms in terms of the duress that people have to live outside the country, and this has to be understood in terms of the dialog. And increasing all of these demands, we have given, and they keep asking us for more and more and more, and we can't. We just can't. Thank you.

Judy Van Name: 

Thank you, Juan. Vera.

Vera Kaminski:

I don’t have a statement. I have a request. During your meeting you quoted a web site. Would you mind putting it on the board?

Judy Van Name: 

I meant to do that at the beginning. I will. And let’s see, was there another hand?

James Brophy:

I forgot to pose one question. Members of my department were also wondering about the parallel students …

…curricular changes whether they are going to be offered in Georgetown, in Wilmington as well, and the feasibility of taking Pathways courses for non-traditional students. That’s something we should also think about. And one final thing that I would like to piggy back on John Hurt’s suggestion is in the documents that we read very infrequently, every now and then, the term writing across the curriculum would be mentioned. And that is something that I think isn’t emphasized enough. If we are going restructure the reforms and think about the General Ed requirements essentially the second writing requirement, I think isn’t working. I think you can talk to people who have been teaching it for decades and that we don’t write enough. I thought her anecdote was very funny, true to John’s humor but it’s very serious there. We aren’t doing enough for writing and if we are talking about general education in general, we should think about stressing this. And to me it is not just a Pathway course, it’s not just a capstone, it’s sending the message that the two hundred, three hundred, four hundred level in every department that writing be emphasized. The college that I went to, I received grades in style and content on my biology lab reports. They took it seriously. You can promote writing skills in many different ways. And that’s something we should discuss as a faculty. Thank you.

Bob Brown:

The Undergraduate Committee our first blush we thought this would be extraordinarily difficult for the parallel program and maybe deans on this campus would have to look at the experiences that parallel students had had after they came here after two years on another campus and see whether they had enough for the different kinds of components and that they could be excused from the Pathways requirements. And then people started telling us well you know it’s not going to be impossible to have some pathways-type experiences on some of the parallel campuses. At our hearing last week Phil Goldstein stood up and talked about how he thought that this was a very doable thing at Wilmington and he sounded rather excited about it. And maybe we should call on Ray Callahan in the back of the room to give us some kind of official response to this question.

Ray Callahan: 

Thank you, Bob. As Carol knows because I buttonholed her a number of times during the preliminary stages of this process. We have always been concerned not that the Pathways idea was not exciting or that it lacked merit. But from the point of view from the parallel program whether it was logistically feasible.

The parallel program has in every academic year approximately one thousand students who are matriculated University of Delaware students. It has 17.5 full time faculty members. There is a very real and pressing resource issue when you consider any new curricular departure as it applies to the parallel program. I told Carol I have told anyone who will stand still long enough to listen to me that mandating new departures in curriculum on this campus which are either incapable of being fully carried out for resource reasons in the parallel program or which could only be carried out sporadically in the Parallel Program is to automatically disadvantage one thousand students a year. And since we tell these students and their parents that the parallel program is the beginning of a process to a four-year University degree or can be at least, we encounter, we would immediately encounter some very serious truth in advertising issues. I’ve been delighted by the willing response of the parallel faculty to this challenge. It is, in fact, being investigated by faculty at all campuses but I would be misleading the committee and my colleagues on this campus if I were not to say that with 17.5 full time faculty and a thousand students a year and no TA’s of any form whatsoever available now or likely to be available in the future, our ability to deliver in the Parallel Program a range of Pathway courses is at this point in my judgement problematic. And I think this is something that we must keep in mind in any final configuration of a curricular change. This is one of the reasons why from the point of view from the Parallel Program, the freshmen interest groups look a lot more doable than a formal Pathway course. So I would not say this afternoon the Parallel Program cannot put a Pathway course in place as a pilot project. I would say that I am a little dubious about the ability to offer them regularly at all three sites—one of whom Dover has only three continuing full time faculty. What is logistically not feasible is seldom good strategy.

Bob Brown: 

This problem also exists for students who are attempting to do a degree at night and for FOCUS although I think there is only one or two degree programs fully available on FOCUS now but it’s a little hard to imagine how if you have Pathways, you would have to mandate that some Pathway sections would have to meet after five o’clock in the afternoon to be available for the night people. I’m not sure how feasible a FIGs proposal is for either part time degree seekers at night or FOCUS people. I’m not sure they would be able to put together a configuration of three courses simultaneously under any circumstances. It might be quite difficult to do that.

Marcia Peoples Halio:

Could I say a word about that? I’ve just spent this summer and this fall developing a distance education version of E110 which will be delivered completely over the internet and while I agree with everything you are saying Bob and Ray and Jim and so forth about the difficulties with people who are taking courses at night or through non traditional adult learners and so forth and so on, I think we should not ignore the possibility of using technology in innovative ways to bring those students into either courses that will be taught on this campus and one of the things that occurred to me was Parallel Program students is that perhaps they could attend lectures through use of technology and broadcast and so forth which is getting better all the time as we look at the future. 

Heyward Brock:

I’m Heyward Brock from the College of Arts and Science. I’ve been at the University for more than thirty years. Been involved in all kinds of programs including interdisciplinary programs, clustering programs, humanities semester, almost everything you can think of. I was also the chair of a committee that more than five years ago in the College of Arts of Science began extensive discussion of the reform of general education and presented a report which, I think, was examined by some of the committees that have worked on these various proposals that are before us. So I’ve been very much involved in this for many, many years. I’m personally interested in general education and committed to it. I think it’s important. I’ve been through many general education reforms at the University including the last two or three that we have experienced in the last two or three decades. I think it’s time for us at this University to look at our general education program. I don’t think it’s a matter of whether it’s broken or not; I think it’s time for us to examine carefully whether we’re doing what we want to do, the way we want to do, and whether or not we are giving our students the kind of educational experiences that we want them to have as University of Delaware graduates and as students who have experienced something that may be different from other institutions. That we have in some how set ourselves apart and done a better job. It seems to me that we, at this point, have a number of proposals on the table. I think they are all proposals worthy of consideration. Some of them may be incompatible. Some of them are certainly different. Some of them are not very different. Some of them address very specific issues and specific things that we are concerned about. Others do not. Some of them are new to us perhaps. Some of them are not new. Any way you look at it there are a lot things for us to consider. And I think what we need to do at this point is to try to bring all of these ideas together and decide which ones we really want to focus on and which ones we really want to do. Because folks we can’t do everything. One of the things that I think is good about the University of Delaware is that we don’t try to do everything. We don’t have a medical school. We don’t have a law school. There are a lot of things we don’t have and that we shouldn’t have. But I think that the things we do, we do really well and I think if we are going to do a major reform of our general education program then we should do it well. And we should do it right. And we should not try to do everything and try to be all things for all people at all times. So I think that we really need to decide what is it that we want to focus on in our general education program at the University of Delaware that will be distinctive for the University of Delaware and that will give us the opportunity to do the things that we can do well with the facilities that we have, with the faculty we have, with the graduate students we have, or whatever and then do that and not try to do everything else. I think we should also think in terms of perhaps about not doing a lot of things now that we are currently doing that will hopefully open up opportunities for us to do some of these new things or different things. So I think it’s important that we don’t rush this. I know that’s important that we keep moving ahead. I really feel much more comfortable moving ahead whenever we feel that we have strong support behind us. And the strongest support has to come from the faculty and the students. It has to come from the University community. The worse possible thing, I think, we could do is to charge ahead without a clear sense of what we are doing, why we are doing it and where we’re going and how we’re going to get there and implement something that will not have the full approbation of the University community. So I think it is very important that we keep the momentum going and that we move ahead but that we begin to clarify and to focus on the things that we think we really want to do and that we have the support for, that are educationally sound, that will characterize the kind of students that we want to educate, and the kind of institution that we want to be. Many people have worked very, very hard to get us to this point and we are almost there but we’re not there in my judgement. We’re ready to keep moving ahead but we’re not quite there yet. So I would urge the Committee to keep us moving ahead but not necessarily to move us in ways that we may not be entirely comfortable with. We are almost there. We are on the right path. Things are beginning to clarify and take shape. Let’s not stop at this point or take something just because we are all tired. Because we are tired. Many of us have been doing this for a long time. But let’s finish the job and let’s do it right and let’s do it in a way that we can say that we were part of that educational reform movement for general education and we took our time and we did right and it was long but it was great when we finished. Thanks.

Judy Van Name:

Thank you, Heyward. Others? Well, my goodness, are we finishing three minutes early? Yes.

Jay Hildebrandt:

I’m Jay Hildebrandt in Music Department. I’m a senator from the Music Department but I’m not particularly representing the Music Department at this time. I’m here on my own. I don’t have anything great to say except that our curriculum is similar to some of the education curriculum, at least our music education program is quite a bit. And it’s loaded with credits without which we would be in danger of losing accreditation. Adding another of number of credits to our curriculum at the same time that the University has told us to reduce the number of credits to our curriculum would put us in a very bad way. And so I have a suggestion to make. We may very well have curricula at the University already accomplish the goals that we’re interested in and perhaps what I’m suggesting in general is that we be more focused on the goals and allow for differences in achieving those goals as opposed to establishing a monolith to fit the entire University. The other point I wanted to make is that I love democracy. I wouldn’t want to live in any other kind of environment. I appreciate the democracy at the University but there can be a tyranny in democracy too. If we had 80 percent support of the University faculty to make some policy changes that might be very detrimental to particular disciplines, we need to watch out that that doesn’t happen. That we don’t act on that just because we have a large number of people in favor of it overall. I don’t think we want to kill the good things we are doing while we’re trying to make general improvements as well. Thank you.

Judy Van Name:

Other comments. Then I’ll ask if any of thecommittee members wish to say anything. It looks like they do not. OK. I think this brings us to the conclusion of our second hearing. We will review all this input. Thank you so much. We wish everyone a happy holiday and will probably see most of you in the next millennium.