GE Minutes 1-7-2014

General Education Committee
7 January 2014
In Attendance: LaFaun Barnhurst, Susan Larsen, Gregory Wright, Steve Hood, Melanie
Jenkins, Adam Larsen, Clinton King, Joseph Papenfuss, Beckie Hermansen
Melanie began the meeting by outlining the history of the GE Committee, and the current
tasks committee is working on. She turned the remainder of the time over to Dr. Steve
Hood, new Academic Vice President.

Dr. Hood led the conversation, focusing on his views of the future of General Education
at Snow College. The following issues came up in the discussion.
• Snow’s strategic plan and Dr. Hood’s support of it.
• Core curriculum is a better term than general education.
• Guiding questions are a good way to organize GE: what does it mean to be human, how should I live my life, what is the universe and how do I fit into it
• More experiments in GE classrooms.
• Introducing disciplines through GE, is that the right approach?
• Dr. Hood gave us a handout that included his ideas and thoughts on each current GE requirement at Snow College.
• Discussion of advantages of the menu system?
• The document he distributed includes a list of classes from other institutions that are “rock star” GE courses. According to Clinton, some of the bio, chem, and phys courses don't seem that different from courses we already teach.
• Discussion of dvantages of assessment using integrated courses in the sciences.
• Discussion of teaching all the classes in the laboratory. There are currently physical resource limitations. There are also time resource limitations.
• The largest barriers to integrated approaches, on this campus, are logistical.
o A potential logistical approach? Redesign course under the same number, but change the section number to designate the redesign.
• A discussion of writing across the curriculum. What are the challenges to having writing in all courses? Some classes do it, but it's certainly not uniform.
• A discussion of cultural and institutional barriers to change, and changes to GE.
• Finally, a discussion about the difference between a competency and a learning outcome?