WSU Today recently sat down with Richard Law, director of the General Education Program, and Dave Stock, chair of the ad hoc General Education Review Committee, to discuss the program. The committee is expected to release a report this summer with specific findings and recommendations, but this discussion was more about general philosophies and trends. The following are brief excerpts from our hour-long discussion:
WSU Today: About 20 years ago WSU embarked on a plan to reconfigure its General Education Program to provide undergraduates with a more coherent, common educational experience as a foundation to work in their majors. Where do you see general education today?
Law: In 1988 we came up with a very good structure for a program, and we implemented it in stages through the year 2000. Now we are working on change within individual classes.
A lot of universities argue over a structure and goals for a year and then put something in place the next year and think they’ve made significant changes. But real change takes longer.
At WSU we took an evolutionary approach, and we’re just beginning to realize many of the potentials. After 16 years, it is still evolving.
But not all the things that have happened over the years have been good. We have had eight years of successive budget cuts. What happens in a long series of cuts is that the introductory courses at the university are disproportionately affected, because chairs will protect their majors and their graduate courses.
Understand that I’m not criticizing anybody. If I were a chair, I’d do the same thing — under these circumstances.
Service courses, as chairs tend to think of them, are their last priority when the cuts go as deep as they have. And so we have had attrition in the quality of the first-year experience.
Stock: And also the last-year’s experience. The tier-three courses have had the same problem. (Tier-three courses are required three-credit 400-level courses outside a student’s major that emphasize critical thinking, research and writing.)
Law: Yes. In the existing system by which units and colleges arrive at their budget decisions, there are no incentives to protect those kinds of courses. One of the things I would like to see before I move on is the emergence of a policy at the central level where, when cuts happen, the service role of providing general education courses is protected.
Introductory general education courses are critical to the quality of every program on campus. We lay the foundation for the majors. If science courses aren’t good, or if we can’t staff writing courses and so on, it has an impact all through the majors. Large classes and poor instruction in the first year also encourage students to leave. You have to give students a quality experience coming in the door.
What I’m hoping for is a policy of balance. Not a policy of privileges for introductory courses over everything else. I’m very much a proponent of research and WSU’s other missions, but we can’t expect to realize the potentials in the undergraduate curriculum unless we keep it strong.
WSU Today: When you say the quality of service courses has declined, what do you mean?
Law: Like most public institutions, WSU usually staffs introductory courses with part-time or adjunct people, and we have lost a lot of those people through the cuts. By the way, I am very skeptical about the claim that adjuncts and temporary people are not as good as tenure-track people. I think they are often better for those instructional purposes. (laughs)
Stock: I think the problem is that if you hire an adjunct two weeks before the class starts, and this is the first time they’ve taught here, you’re going to have problems. I think the adjuncts are very good if there’s continuity. But if you end up having to hire at the last minute, which has happened a lot, then you end up with questionable teaching.
Law: And then think of the lives of adjuncts. They often don’t know if they are going to be teaching until two weeks before classes start. No preparation time. Low salaries.
Stock: Right
Law: It’s not good for anyone.
Stock: Yes, and that’s tied up with the funding model.
WSU Today: There have been calls at the national level for changes in the way student work is assessed or evaluated. What do you think of the debate?
Law: It does seem to be a national movement and not a fad, as assessment is to be increasingly embedded in accreditation standards. It can be a good thing. I’m trying to get my faculty in World Civilizations to participate in assessment as a way of transforming and improving their teaching and their methods of evaluating students.
Real change in the quality of education occurs at the classroom level. The assessment movement provides a way to open up a conversation on pedagogy, on evaluation, on every aspect of what we do as professionals in the classroom. I think we are much more in tune with professional standards of research than we are in professional standards of teaching. Again, my goal would be achieving a kind of balance.
Stock: The big thing with the assessments is that you first have to say, “What are you trying to do?” And then you have to say, “Okay, what measurable criteria can I put forward to evaluate that?” And then you assess to see how you are doing, make improvements, and then assess again — so it is a continual feedback loop.
Law: Exactly.
Stock: It’s not easy. It can be effective and, if it is done right, it does not need to take a lot of faculty time to do it.
WSU Today: What do you see on the horizon for the General Education Program?
Law: The President’s Teaching Academy recently articulated six learning goals for the undergraduate program. An obvious task, and one that is mentioned in the Shoenberg Report on Undergraduate Education, is to reorient our curriculum, both in the majors and in general education, to address those six goals. That is a huge undertaking, but I think a very valuable one. It could be the means by which we re-educate ourselves as an academic institution.
I’m cautiously optimistic. For the first time, I’m no longer by myself as the director of general education. Down the hall is the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology. There’s the Writing Program downstairs. There is a kind of support structure for faculty development that has evolved at WSU in the last few years that simply was not there before.
So we can do this, but it’s going to take an infusion of resources. We can reorient ourselves to the six goals and at the same time create a culture of using evidence to continuously improve teaching.
