Curriculum Review: Proposals

Curriculum proposal (#49)

We are writing as a portion of the current second-year faculty in hopes that we can convey some concerns of junior faculty. As a large influx of tenure-track faculty (nine of us began positions in the fall of 2003), we wanted to offer thoughts that we had in common. We are excited about the possibilities engendered by this curriculum assessment process. In short, we strongly urge change in both curriculum and calendar at Furman; specifically, we hope that the curriculum review process will endorse both a reduction in number and specificity of courses in the General Education Requirements (GERs) and the adoption of a semester system.

CURRICULUM

We find a surprising congruence between our hopes for change in the curriculum and those expressed by the designers of Furman’s new curriculum in 1968. The changes at that time represented “streamlining and enrichment” according to the Dean Bonner (Reid 1976, 219). We, too, believe that “streamlining” and “enrichment” are important goals for the new curriculum.

First, we find ourselves deeply concerned about the number of GERs in the curriculum. As new advisors, we felt this fall that we spent more time helping students begin the “checking-off” process, than we did talking about the broader picture of what they personally hope for in a liberal arts education. The number and (as we will discuss below) the specificity of courses discourage students from constructing a curriculum that challenges them or reflects their potential array of interests.

Second, we find it puzzling that the GERs are so heavily balanced towards the humanities. In the current system, if languages are considered within the humanities, students must take 6-8 humanities courses (depending on their foreign language ability entering Furman), only three or four science and math courses, and only two social science courses. We propose a new plan to simplify – or “streamline” – the process of meeting requirements, so that students can explore a balanced menu in the three major divisions, as well as explore deeply in their major, and beyond.

The courses that students take beyond their major is also a significant concern for us. We feel that not only the number, but also the specificity of the courses that students must take, contribute to the following problem. Many, if not most, of the required GERs are introductory courses (indeed, many of them are also specific introductory courses required of all students.) We believe that this artificially maintains Furman students in a an approach to subjects where they rarely move past the foundation within a discipline: they learn only the “stepping stones” that would take them further in any given field, but don’t pass across them into the more advanced application of the field’s central concepts or methods. Instead, all they seem to expect of their education is that they will absorb multiple introductions to multiple disciplines without building upon those foundations, except in their major.

Enriching the curriculum could be as simple as making GERs more flexible so that students can build upon their base of knowledge; students would take more upper-level courses to fulfill distribution or other kinds of requirements. (Ironically the current curriculum was praised for its “promise of flexibility and vitality” in 1968 (Reid 1976, 219); we tongue-in-cheek propose a campaign slogan for the revised curriculum as “Restore the Promise.”)

To these ends of streamlining and enrichment, of flexibility and vitality, we offer two possible models for the curriculum. Both have emerged in our discussions as possibilities. While we may write as individuals to endorse a particular plan, as a group we see both as having a significant potential to ameliorate the conditions that concern us.

Plan One: Divisional Distribution Requirements:
This plan is designed to encourage students to explore flexibly while ensuring a balance of courses across the divisions. Since individual courses are not specific, students have the option to explore broadly at the introductory level, or to meet division requirements with a combination of introductory and upper-level classes. While this may appear to be a similar load to our current GERs, the numbers are smaller than they appear, because in our plan students overlap their major courses with the divisional requirement for the division of their major. Thus, for example, a biology major does not need to take three additional non-biology courses within the natural sciences division.

For graduation a student would need to complete:

0-3 courses in foreign language*
3 courses in the social sciences
3 courses in the natural sciences & math
3 courses in the humanities, one of which is a composition course**
A 1st-year seminar***
One of the above courses would need to be concerned with “non-western” or US “minority” peoples/ cultures.****

*We believe that if the goal of a language requirement is to ensure that students experience the expansion of horizons that comes with knowing another language, then students who are already proficient, even fluent, in any foreign language should be exempted from the foreign language requirement. By their proficiency or fluency, they have achieved the goals of this requirement. There are a variety of testing services available to assess students in languages not taught at Furman.

**This composition course would be equivalent to the current English 11. We have wondered if perhaps exceptional students could test out of English 11, as determined, of course, by the English Department.

***A first-year (or freshman) seminar meets a number of important goals. These courses would be taught by all departments depending on interest and availability. They would not meet divisional requirements, and thus, would not have to introduce students to a core of a discipline. They would be topical, with an emphasis on teaching students critical thinking skills. Our interest in these seminars stems from our discovery that Furman students prefer to learn facts. An anecdote from one of us captures this issue perfectly: In running a simulation, students had to extrapolate from only limited knowledge about particular countries to their policies on certain issues, a task which they found incomprehensible, and therefore they did not complete the assignment. In the debriefing, one of the very brightest students said, “Professor X, we should have been told that we were allowed to think outside the box!” Many of us, in our individual classrooms, do challenge students to think outside the box, and to think about thinking. However, we hope that if students discover that they are indeed “allowed” to think outside the box from the very beginning of their time here, and if this exhortation takes place in an institutionally-endorsed form such as a required freshman seminar, then their entire time at Furman will proceed quite differently.

****These course designations would be decided by the curriculum committee; obviously, this departs from the current “Asia/Africa” designation. We believe that the current system under-represents areas about which Furman students are under an equal imperative to explore, for example, the Middle East, Latin & Central America, as well as the diverse peoples that make up this country.

Plan Two: Skills-Based Requirements
This plan would also ensure flexibility, since students could draw upon a variety of courses to fulfill each of the ten required skills. The skills are diverse enough to ensure balance within the curriculum, while students are still given flexibility in how they meet these requirements. This plan is based on Pomona College’s curriculum, about which more information can be found at www.pomona.edu/ADWR/Registrar/Overview/Curriculum.shtml. The important aspect to note is that the curriculum committee would be an important and powerful committee under this plan, as they would determine which courses qualified to meet the required skills.

Students would have to take ten courses, each one of which was designated to meet one of the following skills:
1. read literature critically
2. use and understand the scientific method
3. use and understand formal reasoning
4. understand and analyze data
5. analyze creative art critically OR perform or produce creative art
6. explore and understand human behavior
7. explore and understand the relationship between humans and the natural environment
8. explore and understand an historical culture
9. compare and contrast contemporary cultures
10. think critically about values and rationality

In addition, one of these ten courses would be a First-Year Seminar, on the model of those described above. Thus, all Freshmen Seminars would need to meet one of the ten skill requirements.

CALENDAR

In this section, we would like to respectfully disagree with a central tenet of the curriculum review process. We believe that calendar should be considered, and should be considered independently of the curriculum, if the ultimate goal of the process is the enhancement of intellectual vitality at Furman. The five-day per week teaching schedule has direct effects on intellectual vitality at Furman; we believe it does not support student intellectual vitality, nor does it enhance the intellectual vitality of the faculty. We propose a traditional semester system, with classes meeting on the M-W-F or T-Th schedule.

For Furman students, we think that daily class meetings reinforce the tendency to see courses as providing facts that students assimilate. Because students have so little time in between class meetings, their assignments and their study time are broken into short chunks instead of time to reflect on course material or time to immerse themselves in one course’s readings for an entire afternoon. Neither do they learn the critical skills of balancing competing demands and of taking initiative in their own learning as well as they might under a traditional semester system, where they meet less often. We hope a semester system would provide a more supportive structure for reflection, immersion and learning to pro-actively balance competing demands.

The semester system would also benefit Furman by enhancing the intellectual vitality of the faculty. As junior scholars, we face an imperative to teach well upon our arrival at Furman, to be active within our disciplines, to continue with our research agendas, to perform actively in our artistic fields, and/or to serve the University in any number of capacities. Many of us may be preparing new courses, continuing ongoing research projects, or adapting our work to our new location and circumstances. Yet teaching five days per week, with many of us facing the expectation that we are in our offices available to students for most of the working hours of the day, means that these multiple goals truly pose a challenge. Some of us have found that if we want to take even one morning a week to stay out of the office to concentrate on our writing that we are told that senior faculty will not approve. Others of us are active in our fields in ways that require us to travel, to perform, or to do hands-on work on the issues about which we teach. Yet this is difficult all but 10 weeks of the year. Finally, we hear senior faculty at times describing their own research “work week” as Saturday and Sunday. For us, who either have young families or may be considering beginning them, this may not be a workable or desirable solution to the 5-day a week teaching schedule. Furman’s intellectual vitality will be in large part shaped by the extent to which her faculty remain engaged scholars. It seems to us it would serve that interest to give faculty the flexibility to do so.

Thus, for the reasons above, we suggest a semester calendar, but with a month-long winter term in January. We believe that this structure could mitigate potential negatives about the semester system, in that it would allow for study abroad during that term. Departments could choose to offer travel courses in that January term (as well as perhaps during the regular semester). However, our suggested January term would not mandate faculty teaching. Students would be required to complete perhaps three projects during their four winter terms, and these projects could be internships, independent activities subject to faculty approval (but not necessarily direct supervision), or travel, elective or interdisciplinary courses offered by departments or individual faculty. It is possible that an additional month-long term after the spring semester could also be created, which would provide even more flexibility. A semester system would bring significant benefits, with fewer costs than some might fear.

In closing, we would like to thank you for the opportunity you have created, which has inspired so many conversations among faculty, including among ourselves,

Posted by love at November 5, 2004 12:13 PM
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