University Times

The Greece of Plato and Pericles would seem to epitomize the glories of Western culture. But not in Pitt's College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), where students may take courses on classical Greece to meet their non-Western cultures requirement.

That's because CAS defines a "non-Western culture" as being one that is not part of modern North America or western Europe.

The distinction might be unclear to readers of the current version of CAS's general education curriculum. Many things about the curriculum, introduced in its basic form in 1981, are unclear to CAS students — and to faculty themselves, arts and sciences Dean N. John Cooper noted at the spring Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting on April 24. That's why a CAS committee spent the last two years reviewing the curriculum, surveying students and professors, and comparing general education requirements at peer universities.

The CAS curriculum review committee's final report is not a blueprint for overhauling the curriculum, as some committee members reportedly wanted. But it reaffirms the liberal arts core of the curriculum and recommends changes aimed at simplifying general education requirements.

The following is a summary of the committee's recommendations, which may be amended as arts and sciences faculty discuss the report. That discussion will continue at least through the fall.

The full report is available on-line at: www.fcas.pitt.edu

Recommendations requiring broad faculty action

1. Between formal reviews of the curriculum such as the current one and the 1981 revision, faculty should hold ongoing discussions within and across departments about content, goals and pedagogical strategies for teaching general education courses to non-majors.

2. Oral, written, information technology (IT) and quantitative skills should be integrated across the curriculum.

The curriculum review committee endorsed a recommendation by the English department and composition faculty that the concept of "writing across the curriculum" should be broadened to include first-level writing courses. This has always been allowed within the general education requirements, but the committee recommended encouraging departments to offer freshman writing seminars. "Use of approved seminars (instead of General Writing) to meet the first-level writing requirement would strengthen our emphasis on writing across the curriculum, an approach that helps students to develop their writing skills through the experience of writing within their discipline," the report states.

Committee members considered whether students' oral communications and IT education needs would be best served through introducing new required courses on those subjects, but decided that a better way to strengthen those skills would be to integrate oral communication and IT training across the curriculum.

The committee saw no reason to change CAS's quantitative reasoning requirement but emphasized the value of statistics courses in meeting the requirement.

Some $100,000 (made available through return of funds from Pitt's faculty retirement incentive plan) has been earmarked for undergraduate course development in the arts and sciences. The committee suggested that some of the money could be allocated to buying software for IT-based courses, paying consultants to help faculty to develop new cross-curricular courses and funding release time for faculty developing new courses, among other uses.

3. CAS and faculty should make every effort to communicate to students the purpose, value and content of the general education requirements.

"Students don't understand the curriculum," Dean Cooper said at last week's FAS meeting. "It's the faculty's responsibility to tell them what it is, and why we believe in a liberal arts education."

4. Departments and programs should make special efforts to develop courses that address issues of diversity such as race, gender, sexual orientation or religious difference.

"The development of such courses could be facilitated through faculty participation in the highly successful Chan-cellor's Diversity Seminar," the committee wrote.

5. More departments and programs should consider offering capstone courses or experiences.

Currently, 20 out of 51 majors and five of 10 certificate programs in CAS offer capstone courses (such as senior seminars) or experiences (such as internships requiring written or oral reports).

6. Departments should develop mechanisms to monitor what, and how much, students are learning.

University trustees, state and national lawmakers, and accrediting organizations all are pushing for "educational outcomes" measures, Dean Cooper noted. It will be better for students as well as universities if faculty develop such assessment systems, rather than waiting for them to be imposed from the outside, he said.

Recommended curricular changes

1. To help streamline general education requirements, CAS should no longer require a public policy course and should reduce from three to two the number of required courses in the natural sciences.

This proposal generated more discussion at last week's FAS meeting than the rest of the curriculum review committee's recommendations combined.

2. For pedagogical reasons and to clear up confusion, the foreign language requirement should be classified as a general education requirement.

CAS documents have referred to the foreign language requirement variously as a "general education requirement" and a "skills requirement."

3. Departments and programs should develop freshman writing seminars that could fulfill CAS's introductory composition requirement.

4. Courses that address diversity should be recognized as courses that can fulfill one component of the international and foreign culture requirement.

5. CAS should eliminate the current option that allows students to meet the algebra requirement through a computer programming course.

"This is a little-used option that usually creates more problems than it solves for students who attempt it because of the (appropriately) high level of the available courses," the committee wrote.

Proposed administrative changes

1. The approval process for most courses should be simplified, and CAS Council should be responsible for evaluating whether courses are appropriate for the general education curriculum.

The committee wrote: "A major source of faculty and student irritation is that some courses are approved as fulfilling [general education requirements] while other, apparently similar, courses are sometimes not approved" by departmental committees. Eliminating individual general-ed committees and empowering CAS Council to approve new courses "would greatly reduce faculty frustrations with the cumbersome nature of the current process, without compromising quality or the role of faculty in determining the curriculum," according to the committee.

The new procedure would not apply to W-courses, writing-based courses in disciplines other than English composition.

2. To perform its additional course-approval duties, CAS Council should be expanded from six to nine faculty members.

This change would require amending Faculty of Arts and Sciences bylaws.

3. Courses should be dropped from the CAS General Education Catalogue if they have not been taught for the preceding five years.

Dean Cooper said the 1981 curriculum succeeded too well in one of its key goals: generating new courses. The college's General Education Catalogue lists some 5,000 courses. "Some of these courses have not been taught in 10 years," the dean said. "There are courses about countries that no longer exist. The catalogue just keeps growing and growing. It's very confusing to students" because many courses are no longer available.

4. General education courses should be reviewed every five years to determine whether they are still appropriate for the general education curriculum.

The committee suggested doing these reviews in conjunction with external reviews of departments (conducted every 10 years) and internal "mini-reviews" (which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences conducts at the five-year mid-points between external reviews).

5. Department/program external reviews and mini-reviews should evaluate units' capstone courses and explore how units have integrated oral, written, IT and quantitative skills across courses they offer.

6. Structural barriers to interdisciplinary and team teaching should be reduced.

The curriculum review committee did not reach consensus on CAS's foreign language requirement, which requires students to complete two terms of university-level study in a single foreign language unless they can show elementary proficiency in a foreign language through:

* Completion of three years of high school study of a single foreign language with a grade of C or better.

* Successful completion of a special proficiency exam, or

* Transfer of credit for two terms or more of CAS-approved, college-level instruction in a single foreign language with grades of C or better.

(Students whose native language is not English, or who are bilingual, are exempted from the requirement.) Some members of the curriculum review committee argued for abolishing the foreign language requirement, according to the committee's report.

In addition, "Some questioned if the current exemption for students who have taken three years of a foreign language in high school is truly equivalent to a year of college instruction, although there was recognition that requiring all students to take college-level language courses would be a major addition to an already crowded curriculum since first-year instruction in a foreign language is normally a 10-credit load.

"A compromise might involve the introduction of standardized testing for entering students, but that would also imply that we know what outcomes are achieved by students who take our own language courses. There was agreement that if we maintain the current foreign language requirement, this should be treated as a [general education requirement] rather than a skill requirement," the committee wrote.

— Bruce Steele