General Education Essentials

General Education Essentials "Full-time and part-time faculty in any discipline and at any size campus with any type of mission can pick up this volume and learn something that will help her or him improve teaching and learning." —From the Foreword by Terrel L. Rhodes, vice president for Curriculum, Quality, and Assessment, Association of American Colleges and Universities Every year, hundreds of small colleges, state schools, and large, research-oriented universities across the United States (and, increasingly, Europe and Asia) revisit their core and general education curricula, often moving toward more integrative models. And every year, faculty members who are highly skilled in narrowly defined fields ask two simple questions: "Why?" and "How is this going to affect me?" General Education Essentials seeks to answer these and other questions by providing a much-needed overview of and a rationale for the recent shift in general education curricular design, a sense of how this shift can affect a faculty member's teaching, and an understanding of how all of this might impact course and student assessment. Filled with examples from a variety of disciplines that will spark insights, General Education Essentials explores the techniques that can be used to ensure that students are gaining the skills they need to be perceptive scholars and productive citizens. "This is THE ONE BOOK for academics to get up to speed about reforming general education." —Jerry Gaff, senior scholar, Association of American Colleges and Universities

Foreword xi About the Author xv Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 PART ONE: THE BIG PICTURE 9 1 Structuring General Education 11 2 Some Examples of Integrative Curricular Models 25 PART TWO: GENERAL EDUCATION AT THE COURSE LEVEL 43 3 Designing Effective General Education Courses 45 4 How the Purposes of General Education Can Reshape a Course: Case Studies 54 PART THREE: GENERAL EDUCATION AT THE ASSIGNMENT AND ASSESSMENT LEVEL 73 5 Designing Appropriate Assignments for General Education 75 6 The Chapter You May Want to Skip: Institutional Assessment and General Education 94 Conclusion 107 Appendix A: Syllabus for Artistic and Literary Responses to Science and Technology 109 Appendix B: Syllabus for The Way Things Work: Sky Diving and Deep Sea Diving 117 Appendix C: Syllabus for Traveling Without Leaving: Global Sociology 125 Appendix D: Syllabus for Elite Deviance: Crime in the Suites 137 Appendix E: Syllabus for Does Gun Control Save Lives? 145 Appendix F: Syllabus for Statistics and Botany 151 References 157 Index 161