The College of Arts and Sciences is ready to lay down some bets.
In what amounts to a bit of educational experimentation, the college has chosen six proposals to launch the General Education Renaissance project with the goal of re-enlivening the UO’s core undergraduate curriculum. The innovations in the proposals aim to build new connections among disciplines, better engage students who are getting their first exposure to university courses and showcase the UO’s ace in the hole – its faculty.
Professor Ian F. McNeely, the CAS associate dean for undergraduate education, said the project offers faculty a chance to stretch themselves and explore new ways of teaching and new approaches to subject matter. Success isn’t guaranteed, he said, but payoffs usually only happen when people are willing to take chances.
“We’re sort of like venture capitalists,” McNeely said of the project. “Thanks to some generous donor support, we’re able to put down bets on a lot of enterprises, and some of them may not succeed. But some of them might catalyze change across the institution.”
The General Education Renaissance project is a three-year effort to make the core liberal arts curriculum a showcase for what a great university offers its undergraduate students, especially those who are just entering the institution. The College of Arts and Sciences provides about 85 percent of all the general education courses offered at the university.
The first-round proposals go to the core of general education, encompassing composition, psychology, foreign language, quantitative reasoning and social justice. A common thread is the effort to link new and revamped classes to other parts of the core arts and sciences curriculum, allowing students to pursue individual interests across multiple courses.
The college received 14 proposals after rolling out the project in series of lunchtime gatherings last fall. Karen Sprague, a special advisor for undergraduate initiatives in the college and a professor of biology, said the response was enthusiastic.
“We didn’t have to twist any arms,” she said. “The excitement was already there. The only difficulty was choosing just six of the proposals to fund. Each of the 14 was intellectually appealing and focused on at least one important aspect of General Education.”
That includes ethnic studies and political science professor Daniel HoSang, the team leader for the Inequality, Justice and Difference project. He said team members are thrilled the proposal was chosen and are looking forward to digging into the cluster approach that will be a signature part of the new courses.
The series of courses will bring in faculty from several disciplines, allowing students to look at issues of justice and inequality from perspectives as varied as the California music scene to politics and economics. It will bring the UO’s well-known interdisciplinary approach to research all the way to the level of introductory courses.
“In the end, we hope students will have a facility with and a depth of knowledge of these issues they wouldn’t have had otherwise,” HoSang said. “I also think that allowing the students to consider the issues from different vantage points helps them find answers they’ll find more satisfying.”
Sprague said one of the main thrusts of the initiative is to ensure that entering students, who often are getting their first exposure to university-level learning, have the chance to learn from and interact with senior faculty. That’s something students are likely to experience only at a research university and a big advantage to an education at the UO rather than online or at a community college.
McNeely and Sprague said one of the initiative’s primary goals is to dispel the notion that lower division, introductory courses are just boxes to check off. HoSang said it’s also a chance for senior faculty to convey their enthusiasm for discovery and research to students who are just beginning their intellectual journeys.
“For faculty, this signals the importance of the general education curriculum,” he said. “I think the idea is to bring what’s best about your teaching and research to the introductory level.”
Although the new courses are expected to take new approaches to teaching, they won’t change the basic structure of large lecture classes. Faculty were encouraged to come up with ideas that make learning more engaging regardless of class size.
The project is funded through the Rippey Innovative Teaching Fund, which was designed to keep senior faculty engaged in the general education enterprise. All of the projects are led by tenured professors, but some also include junior faculty as participants.
Grants in the first round range from $8,000 for individual proposals to $40,000 for collaborative groups. The call for 2014-15 proposals is expected to go out this fall.
-By Greg Bolt, CAS communications specialist
THE PROJECTS:
Empowering Learners of Spanish Language: Language Acquisition through Social Science Content
More than half of all UO undergraduates have some Spanish skills but are not ready for or do not intend to take upper-division language courses. These courses will help students hone their proficiency and gain confidence in reading and speaking Spanish. By using Spanish-language writings as study material, courses also will expand students’ understanding of Latino culture in America and Spanish-speaking countries. Taught by a linguist, a sociolinguist and a historian, classes will expose students to the range of Spanish dialects, the use and development of “Spanglish” and the history of Latinos in the Americas. Courses will not follow the immersion model but will encourage switching between English and Spanish to help students become more comfortable with the language.
Graphical Literacy and Quantitative Reasoning
These courses will help students “see” complex data. A critical skill in today’s world is the ability to both create and understand visual representations of data: charts, graphs, story maps and the like. Climate change is an obvious example of an issue that depends on graphical literacy. Courses will use freely available graphical tools and databases accessible to novices to show students how data can be represented visually and how to interpret, analyze, synthesize and communicate that data. In our era of “big data,” giving students the ability to visualize and interpret information in graphical form and then to communicate their findings to others is a key skill for understanding our rapidly changing world.
Health, Bioethics and Social Inequality
The world today presents increasingly challenging questions surrounding the use of medical technology and disparities in health care delivery. These courses will help students understand different perceptions of health in different cultures, the effects of new genetic and reproductive technologies on medical ethics and the response to suffering in a globalized world. They also will teach a more complex view of health to include not only the absence of illness but also a person’s overall well-being. Small-group discussions will be a key element, and students will be expected to engage in live and online conversations, debates and role-playing.
Inequality, Justice and Difference
This project explores the political, cultural and social dimensions of economic inequality in the United States today, which by some measures is at its highest level in 75 years. To do that, the project team will use an innovative cluster approach to the subject, drawing on a half dozen faculty mostly from the social sciences. While concepts of inequality are studied in many UO courses, the cluster approach will offer an interconnected set of classes that will help students explore and tie together many facets of contemporary and historical inequality studies. Cross-lecturing also will give students exposure to faculty with expertise in related subjects. The project includes a strong assessment component to measure results and guide future expansion. Although the pilot phase leans strongly on social science faculty, the approach has the potential to expand into other disciplines in the General Education curriculum.
Peer Labs for Introduction to Psychology
PSY 202 is one of the university’s largest lecture-based courses, with more than 1,600 students registering each year. This program will offer undergraduates a new peer mentoring opportunity and the chance to engage more deeply with the subject matter. The benefits will be twofold. First, the labs will give students firsthand experience collecting and interpreting data, considering alternate explanations for the results and developing new hypotheses that build critical thinking skills. Second, the most talented peer students will gain a novel learning and leadership experience. Peer leaders will take a seminar, once as an apprentice and a refresher during their lab term, to receive training and review key concepts. Online lab activities will continue, but the peer-led sections will provide a forum for asking questions, practicing basic science literacy skills and asking logistical questions.
Writing Connections
The aim with this initiative is to provide a stronger connection between writing composition classes and issues in the General Education curriculum. To do that, topically oriented composition sections will be developed using reading and writing assignments drawn from casebooks that bring together material on ideas covered in the General Education curriculum. Topic examples include free speech, sustainability, social protest, the culture of science and others. These classes will allow students to make intellectual connections with their General Education coursework through research, the development of arguments and counter arguments and essay writing.