Curricular Commons Jeremy Cohen Where Do We Come From?What Are We?Where Are We Going? —Paul Gauguin, 1897 The three sets of questions that follow should be familiar to anyone who has kept abreast of or contributed to the last four decades of debates by accreditation agencies, faculty senates, administrators, academic advisers, and even the federal government over assessment, general education content, and the arts and sciences of how students learn. I Does the general education curriculum at your college have specific learning objectives that represent a common faculty and student understanding of what the general education program is supposed to accomplish? Are the faculty explicit about the curricular learning outcomes necessary to meet those objectives? Is there a shared understanding of how best to document the level of accomplishment of those student outcomes? II Assuming that the answer to each of these questions is affirmative (wishful thinking, perhaps), the next question moves from the programmatic to the course level: Do the individual courses that meet your school’s general education requirements possess a common faculty and student understanding of how each course contributes to general education’s programmatic goals, [End Page vi] what learning outcomes are necessary in each course to meet general education’s programmatic objectives, and how general education courses succeed (or fail) individually and collectively to create a unified curriculum rather than a free-form aggregation of credits? A course may be interesting and valuable in and of itself and yet fail to contribute to larger goals such as critical thinking across disciplines, awareness of self and others sufficient to meet twenty-first-century demands, and cognizance of how we are like or different from earlier generations. III Should general education include identifiable elements of knowledge, such as the scientific method; the identification and understanding of specific religions; divergent political, religious, and economic doctrines; American, Western, or world literature; and/or the sociology, human rights, and legal implications of digitization? Other required knowledge elements, from anthropology to zoology, appear at one campus or another. Yet in the realpolitik of limited time, budget, and tolerance for the other person’s academic specialty, each required inclusion means that another element—the history of art? social media? democracy? statistics? classics? geography? rhetoric? drama?—must be identified as unnecessary to the broader aims of required distributions of courses outside of each student’s major. IV Several issues of the Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences published over the last two years have been thematic and have included a variety of invited voices. Volume 62, number 1, for example, focused on E. O. Wilson’s recently published The Social Conquest of Earth and his attention to Paul Gauguin’s iconic painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? The issue you are about to read, volume 64, number 1, began with no such preplanning for a theme or emphasis. It includes only refereed studies and essays that were submitted and received across the transom. Yet in this issue, too, there appears to be a common thread. In the pages that follow, the contributors are asking: • Does general education have purposeful and identifiable learning objectives and outcomes? If so, are the faculty aware of them? [End Page vii] • Do general education courses support programmatic goals rather than an aggregate of atomistic fragments fighting for space, dollars, and legitimacy in the academic hierarchy? • Are there specific elements of knowledge and viewpoint that are so important to understanding ourselves, the times in which we reside, and the decisions we will make, whether through ignorance, inaction, or informed enlightenment, that they should be included in every undergraduate’s academic experience? There are two ways to read the five studies and essays that follow. We might conclude from their observations and findings that those who continue to believe that somehow, despite evidence of dysfunctional systems of general education in which colleges and universities are unable or unwilling to contend with the three sets of curricular assessment questions that introduce this note, general education has a positive impact. To this group, I offer Ernest Hemingway as a way to say, “Be careful about what you...
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Sep 26, 2018
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