By MARTY LEVINE
The General Education Task Force’s work in re-thinking Pitt’s approach to University-wide GenEd is headed into Phase 2 this spring, Belkys Torres, associate vice provost for Inclusive Excellence in Education, told the Educational Policies Committee on Jan. 10, and then Faculty Assembly shortly afterward.
Phase 1 involved listening sessions for faculty and staff, the creation of a library guide to the task force’s work, and the study of 11 peer institutions already engaged in this work (see previous UTimes story).
Phase 2 this year, she told the committee briefly, will involve soliciting feedback on a GenEd white paper (an initial draft of student learning outcomes and rubrics for feedback across all campuses this summer); seeking advice about a shared governance structure for the new general education program, and generally requesting further faculty feedback.
“I come to you today with some questions and seeking your counsel,” Torres said. “My hope is to just seed the conversation today.”
John Stoner, committee co-chair from the History faculty at the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, noted that, since Pitt has disparate general education requirements across different schools and units, there might be some schools working more recently on their own revisions, and their work could be instructive.
Indeed, Torres said, the Bradford and Greensburg campuses in particular have been working on their own GenEd requirements and are welcoming others to the conversation. However, she added, some Pitt educational units haven’t thought about changes “in decades.”
Therefore, Stoner added, won’t it be a fundamental challenge that general education has usually been seen as governed by each school?
Part of the task force’s benchmarking against peer universities, Torres explained, has involved examining the sorts of administrative oversight employed for GenEd requirements across schools: “In most cases, schools tend to keep their prior structures” but bring the syllabi for those courses to their version of the University Senate, or to a committee therein, for advice and approval. “This might be a model for us,” Torres said.
At Faculty Assembly, after hearing Torres’ presentation again, Stoner remarked that much of the course oversight and approval among peer institutions happens in shared governance bodies, which presents “an opportunity for staff, faculty and students to all have input, both as the evolution of this continues, but also once it’s in place, how it’s assessed, how it evolves, etc.”
“One of the things we’re trying to ask ourselves,” Torres responded, “is how do we continue to respect shared governance and do so in such a way that all schools have faculty representation, and all campuses have faculty, staff and student representation in this decision-making body moving forward, and what does that body look like, and what are the objectives of that group?”
Further at Faculty Assembly, History faculty member Laura Lovett suggested that one desirable GenEd outcome ought to be helping students to gain more insight into the democratic process, which also serves to encourage students to vote.
Chris Nygren, faculty in the History of Art and Architecture, asked whether there would be “vulnerability in the accreditation process” from new GenEd conceptions and courses — at the school or university level.
When the Middle States Commission on Higher Education Accreditation “asks pointed questions about what our student learning outcomes are as an institution, how we are assessing that student learning and how it is tied to our foundational curriculum, we cannot … as an institution respond to that question because, to your point, some schools do a phenomenal job, and others not so much,” Torres said.
“And so part of the work that we’re thinking about here is making sure that, Pitt-wide and now including all schools and campuses, we have a really robust approach to answering those questions of accreditors: What are the foundational learning outcomes that students are achieving through general education? How are you assessing that and, over time, what are the metrics and goals that you’re trying to reach? And how are you reaching those?”
Eleanor Mattern, School of Computing and Information faculty member, wondered whether the GenEd task force was “thinking about how maybe to build in a more meta-objective test to support students in understanding the rationale for the (GenEd) fabric and how to see the linkages across the curriculum.”
“That is absolutely something that we are looking at,” Torres said. “We’ve seen some models that are really promising. We’re just trying to figure out in conversation with all of you and other curricular bodies what makes most sense for Pitt. But yes, absolutely … to find a program that has a beginning, a middle and an end, that students can actually iterate, that students can actually, upon self-reflection — that might be through a capstone, that might be through some kind of work that is threaded through their experience outside of the curriculum, but within the major, for example — that they can understand logically why and how the courses that they took in year one, two, etc., led them to three, four, and have prepared them for life beyond the institution.
“And so the questions that we’re asking right now are not, should we do this? It’s how do we ensure that kind of meta-cognitive approach, so that as students are going through this from day one, they understand this is why we are committed to this liberal arts education, for you.”
She added: “We’re not talking about assessing how students have done in a particular course — it’s very much the purview of the faculty. For us, it’s has the program allowed students to achieve particular learning outcomes, and if there are gaps in that program, what do we do to course correct?
“There’s some folks who will say, all courses that count for general education should have one signature assignment, and then that’s the signature assignment that gets assessed by an independent curricular review body on a regular basis, and there’s this assessment plan for how to do that.
“There are others who embed program assessment as part of the university-wide curricular learning and program improvements. We’re looking at all of those models right now to ask precisely those questions.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859. Shannon Wells contributed reporting to this article.
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